Colonial Surprise

By Scott Arsenault

It was late May and after a rainy Spring most of the fields around here were saturated and hadn't been planted yet. The field where I found the Pine Tree three pence is only a couple of miles from my house and I usually hit it for a couple of hours after I get home from work. I had just been to the site the previous weekend with a couple of guys from our club, The Colonial Treasure Hunters, and didn't find much. On the evening I found the 3 pence I arrived at the field around 6:30. When I pulled up to the field one of the farmers was out turning it over again. I talked with him for a few minutes and he told me they'd be turning it over for the next week or so to try to dry it out some so they could plant. So already the night started off with some good news, I'd have fresh dirt to hunt for the next week.

I headed for an area of the field that usually produces the most old finds. I had probably hunted for about 45 minutes and hadn't dug much, a flat button here and there but nothing too exciting. Then I got the sound I was waiting for, I bumped the discrimination up, the target dropped off before coin range but could still be a 1/2 real or an Indian head. When I took the shovel and turned some of the dirt over a small black disk was lying on top. The first thought I had was, ALRIGHT! I think I've got a half real. Even after I picked it up and noticed how thin it was I was still thinking it was Spanish silver. When I held the coin closer to me the first thing I noticed was the amount of thick black corrosion that covered it, it had to have been in the field a long time for it to get that bad. After I got some of the dirt off the coin I could see what looked like a tree in the middle of one side, almost immediately my hands started shaking. My hunting buddy had dug a Pine Tree 3 pence in this field the year before, could this be a second.

The hunt was over then and  there. I made a couple of last swings around the area to make sure there wasn't another around and packed up and went home. When I finally got it home and got a lot of the corrosion off it there was actually a lot more detail than I thought and it was no doubt a Massachusetts Pine Tree 3 Pence. This coin was the biggest goal I had set when I started detecting, I wanted to find a Massachusetts silver above anything else and now I had one.

Can't wait for the fields to thaw and the longer days to get here. I can't think of a better way to spend a couple hours after work then wandering around in those fields, there's gotta be a couple more of them out there.

HH..........................Scott