I've lived in this area my whole life but, as a kid, never in the same house for very long. While growing up, we would move to a different location in the same town about every 3-4 years for one reason or another. When I see something getting torn down/out it automatically makes me think back to growing up and the experiences I had in that area.

Without even realizing the hunting potential of this particular site at the moment, I was about to discover a place that would produce my best find(s) to date. Here's how it happened.

My little brother and I were talking on the phone about an area right behind his house where they had just started to tear down about 8 homes in a row to make way for a new strip mall. My brother was going off about how bad it's going to be when the delivery and garbage trucks come through the block between his house and the new strip mall and that he was considering moving. He lives in a neighborhood that is steadily being transformed from residential to commercial. He has an I-hop 3 houses down now. As children, we used to play throughout the thick trees behind these homes that were torn out until someone would chase us off. After listening to my brother vent for a while I asked him if he thought we could hunt there after they were done tearing it out and cleaning up. He said yes, he thought so and agreed to keep an eye on it and let me know when they were done.

About two weeks went by and he finally felt it was safe to hunt without bothering anything or anyone. We made plans to go there after work for a few hours each night starting the very next night and on weekends when we could. When we arrived at the site for the first time the construction company that was doing the work had fenced the entire area off with a tall chain link fence. The fence ran short on one end and left a gap about 6ft wide. There were no signs saying to stay out so we went in. It was amazing in there, you could still see were every home used to be, they didn't take out the curbs yet so the driveway approaches were still there and there was a pit where they dug out the houses. I would say that from the street to the rear of the property was a good 100 yards, maybe more, they were huge lots. The entire back half of every lot was thickly wooded with minimal clearing. I'm not sure what kind of trees they were but I would guess on average the trees were anywhere from 10” to 2' around and 25-40 feet tall. In a few places you could tell the residence cleared out a few trees for whatever reason.

While my brother went off to do his thing, I started hunting the driveways first with some good luck right off the bat. The first night I found 3 silver Rosie's and a few wheaties not to mention all of the weird stuff and junk. My brother found a bunch of clad, some old toy cars, 2 Merc's and a few wheaties. The second night my brother came out with a pouch full of copper and aluminum chunks and wire as well as a little bit of clad, 1 silver quarter and 1 silver Rosie. I found several clad coins and a few more wheaties along with an old copper lipstick tube and 1 Merc. I had been hunting the driveways only these first two nights and he hunted the foundation holes.

 

The third night when we showed up, the construction company had bulldozed over a lot of the trees in what looked to me like a strategic manner. I'm not sure why they only pushed down and piled up certain areas like that but it had opened it up enough that you could hunt without it being a horrible task. This excited me and that's exactly where I wanted to hunt now that the driveways were done. My brother headed off to do his thing and I started hunting the trees. At first, I just found a few chunks of aluminum and a small amount of clad. As I came around one of the big piles of trees they had stacked up, my DFX sang a sweet song at the top of its voice. It read +88 and went from quarter to half and back and showed the target to be 2” deep. At first I thought it was going to be another chunk of aluminum but I had to check it out. The dirt there had been beaten to a fine baby powder like dust so I was hesitant to set my DFX in the stuff. I could just imagine what this dust would do if in got inside. I kept the DFX in my right hand and grabbed my pin pointer with the other. I started to move the pin pointer through the 2-3” deep powdery dirt, and BOOM, there was a signal.

 

I grabbed a hand full of the dirt and shook it with my fingers gapped a little to sift it out. There in my hand were two Merc's. I about fainted, I've never found two of them together like that before. I dropped them into my pouch, scanned again, still got a signal so I repeated the process with my pin pointer then the sifting. The second time I came up with three more Merc's, now I was very excited and kinda in disbelief of my luck. After putting these in my pouch I scanned again and the signal was still there, just over, a bit closer to the log pile. I decided to get the DFX out of my hand and get serious, I didn't want to miss anything. I figured I'd be as thorough as I possibly could, between scanning the ground with the DFX, using the pin pointer and running the dirt over the coil a hand full at a time in all metal mode I wouldn't miss a thing. I reached up and grabbed a small log with my left hand and dropped it on the ground to rest the control box of my DFX on. I then flipped the trigger forward to all metal mode and set the DFX down, resting the control box on the small log and the coil on a log in the pile right in front of and just above the ground where I picked up the dimes. As soon as I set the DFX down it went crazy, I mean almost to the point of an overload. I picked it up and it quit, set it down and it went nuts again. You DFX owners know this sound when the tone ID is on, it's a very high pitched scream that almost blows out your ears. At first I didn't know what the heck was going on. I thought my detector was freaking out on me for a second. I put the trigger back in the center position and set it down once more. As I set the DFX down it went off again, just not as bad as it did in all metal mode. This is when I realized it was picking up something in the tree pile. I stood up and swung over the logs in the fallen tree pile where the coil was resting and sure enough, there was a very strong signal.

 

As I swept the coil back and forth over the logs I was hearing the good signal but I was a little confused, when I pin pointed, the depth was saying about 4” but it was a little more than a foot to the ground through the trees in the pile. I could see there was nothing there but wood. I flopped the top piece of tree that my coil had been resting on out of the way, it had been broken at both ends from the bulldozer and was about 8' long and 10-12” around. I checked again and the signal was gone. I thought, what the...??? I kept checking in there and couldn't ever get the strong signal back. I gave up on this target fairly quick as my interest went straight back to the Merc's I'd been finding in the dirt. I ended up finding 23 Merc's in the dirt within an area about 3' long and 18” wide by the base of this tree pile. The deepest I had to dig in the loose dirt was about 4” deep, there was no effort involved at all, they were all basically right on top. I thought I was in heaven. I've never even come close to a find like this. I couldn't wait to show these to my brother who was still hunting over where the houses used to be.

Now, this is were things got weird. After I was sure I picked up everything there in the dirt, I set the DFX down on the tree pile so I could put the log I flopped off the pile back on. I didn't want to ruin our chances of coming back by leaving it this way. As I grabbed the log, I lifted and rolled it a bit so that I could flop it back onto the pile. As I did this, I thought I heard a very faint sound that sounded like change clanking. As I dropped it back onto the pile I heard the muffled sound again. I grabbed the log by the end, pulled it back off the pile, stood it up and shook it back and forth. There it was, sure enough, a change clanking sound in the log, it was very faint but there as sure as I was. I laid it flat on the ground and rolled it a bit to see if I could see anything. On the side, facing my left, about 2' from the one end there was a knothole about the size of a golf ball. I turned the log so the knothole was facing down, lifted a bit and shook. I couldn't believe my eyes, a few dimes dropped out. I'm sure this is where the dimes I found on the ground came from and it explains the DFX going nuts over the logs. The dimes must have fallen out through the knothole while the logs were being moved and stacked by the dozer. I hollered to my brother and waved him over. As we were trying to get the dimes out the hole plugged a few times with gunk from inside the cavity but we were able to clear it easy with a stick. We ended up using my digging trowel to split and peel the wood and bark off and to open the hole up big enough to clean it out. By now my brother and I were in shock, all he could say was "WOW(edited) what's the chance of this happening."

 

I was scared to death and just wanted to get them out and go, fast. We ended up with a total of 216 Merc's found inside the log and 22 Merc's on the ground in the dirt under where the log had been lying. There are always several unanswered questions with finds like this. Who put them there? Why did they put them there? Why did they leave them there? How long have they been there? And on and on. The only explanation I have is that someone thought this knothole would be the perfect place to hoard/save dimes for a rainy day. Why they never got them out, well, I guess we'll never know. I honestly feel very lucky to find/stumble across something like this. It was pure chance I found those coins. The piles of trees at the site were cleaned up and hauled away within a few days. Who knows where they ended up. We were able to hunt the site for 3 or 4 more days before others started to show up and hunt. The total count on all silver coins found for me at this site over an 8 day stretch is, 239 merc's, 7 rosies, 2 barber dimes, 6 quarters, 4 halfs, one very worn peace dollar and a 1957 50 PTAS that I'm guessing is silver.

HH to all.

Sparkymaster