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One day a friend at work came in and showed us a token he had
found the day before. It was pretty beat up but we could tell it
was a token. He had found it metal detecting where they were
tearing up a parking lot behind a row of buildings that had once
been saloons and pool halls (25th Street.) After work my hunting
partner and I bee-lined it over there with our detectors.
We had hunted for about an hour when I swung my detector over
something that seemed too large to be a coin. I started digging.
(When you are in an area that is over 100 years old, you dig
everything). My first scoop with the shovel came up with over a
dozen tokens. I spent the next 20 minutes digging up tokens,
then I called my partner over. He watched for awhile until he
couldn't take it anymore. He asked if he could have just one
scoop with his shovel. I didn't mind. After my pockets wouldn't
hold any more tokens, I ran to the nearest trash bin to find a
box. I did this twice as the first box I found wouldn't hold
them all. By the time I was done, the hole was 2 feet wide and a
foot deep, and a small crowd had gathered.
The owner of a nearby
store came out with his detector and started detecting close to
my hole, (which I found amusing as he didn't know how to use the
machine.) Ogden was a railroad town back in the 1800's, a town
where people came to drink, play pool and carouse. All along
25th St. there were bars, saloons, pool halls, and lots of
women! Also within these places there were slot machines.
Patrons would often use tokens instead of nickels in the slot
machines. When the slot-machine vendor would empty the machines
he would put all the tokens in a container of some kind and
either drop them in an outhouse or an open trash pit--waiting
for me to find. When I hit the mother load, I wasn't sure if I
was digging up different tokens or a whole bunch of the same
kind of token. When I got home and cleaned them up I found I had
many different kinds. Most of the tokens were from Ogden,
Salt Lake City, and surrounding towns. Many though were from out
of state, NV., Mont., Colo., Calif. (SF), Id., Kan., Wash. St.,
Wyo., and Neb. with some mavericks. The location where I found
these is directly across from the train depot which explains the
out-of-state tokens. There were also some nice coins in the
hoard: 2 shield nickels, 2 Indian heads, 8 "V"
nickels, a few Chinese coins, and other foreign coins. All were
from the 1800's. I'm always happy to get 2 or 3 coins in a hole,
but never thought I would find 500.----ME
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