Civil War Gold!By Bill Dancy
The story surrounding this find is really not a very exciting one. As a matter of fact, if not for my hunting partner's generosity in sharing this site, I wouldn't be writing this at all. Barry, my new hunting partner at the time, happened to stumble across this site about a year ago. It was just down the street from his home in Chesapeake, VA. It was a several acre waterfront parcel owned by a church, and was located in a relatively old part of town. After Barry obtained permission from some very nice folks at the church, he decided to give it a quick try one afternoon. As I recall, he found a couple of silver dimes, including a barber, plus a button or two. We soon got together to hunt this place a little more thoroughly, and immediately started finding Civil War era buttons, bullets and buckles. Obviously, we had stumbled across a camp, but it must have been used at different times by both sides, as both Union and Confederate relics were dug. We hit the site hard over the next few months, and
even invited some of our other friends to share in the action.
Seems like no matter how many times we would return, we would
always come home with at least a few good finds in our pouches.
In addition to CW items, we also found coins and other artifacts
from the late 1800s to early 1900s. Barry
and I both made several firsts there.
I found a Georgia state seal button, a SNY plate (chewed up), some
nice Navy buttons, an 1853 half dime, an 1801 half reale, a Company
"B" hat letter, barber and standing liberty halves, and many
other items too numerous to mention.
Barry found a 3-ringer glory hole, and pulled more than 50 bullets
from that single spot. One Saturday in July, we got an early start to beat
the heat. Things had been
rather slow that day – only a couple of flat buttons and a bullet or
two. I had been digging just
about every positive signal, as a lot of the small buttons were reading
quite low. Well, I got
another one of those readings – came in at a consistent VDI of 10 on my
XLT. Sounded like just
another small button to me – and only reading about 2 inches deep.
I took an easy swing with my pick-axe digging tool, and raked a
small pile of dirt toward me. Sitting
right there in front of my eyes on top of the pile was a brightly
gleaming, but very small gold disk. I
immediately saw the liberty head, but no other markings were evident.
So I was a little |
puzzled as to what I was looking at.