At a recent meeting of our East Central Indiana Treasure Hunters Club, we watched a program by one of the members on how to find old house sites.

He searched “Historic Map Works” on his computer. Then, clicked on Indiana, went to his county (Blackford), then clicked on the name of the township he was searching.

The screen showed many old house sites, school locations, churches and a variety of other old markings on his map.

I went home and tried it and found a plat map from 1880 in Fall Creek Township, Madison County.

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It showed a bunch of houses, several schools and even a toll house nearby.

One of the old schools turned out to be in the front yard of one of our friends from church.

We obtained his permission to search his yard for old coins, artifacts and relics with our metal detectors.

We taught both him and his wife how to detect, and the four of us searched his yard.

We found some trash (always), some coins (none very old), a harmonica reed, and — after digging his yard with a shovel (with his permission) — we uncovered what turned out to be the heavy metal base with a hole in the center to hold a flag.

The lady immediately went to the house and returned with a picture of the old schoolhouse with the flagpole on the front step, standing in the base we had just found. We ran out of time that day but intend on spending more time searching his yard for valuable finds.

On the computer, I found another field that showed three houses back in the 1800s. I didn’t know who the owner was, but I finally caught the farmer picking beans in this field and got permission to hunt his field.

Susie and I spent several hours trying to find where the old houses used to stand. We dug a lot of smashed cans, probably destroyed by a plow or other farm equipment.

Finally, we came to a slightly raised portion of the field and started finding broken pieces of old pottery and broken red bricks. These are both signs of old house sites. We had finally found one of the three.

While the broken pottery pieces aren’t valuable, we began picking them up off the ground and putting them in our coin pouches. They were of various colors, thicknesses and patterns. We also found small pieces of broken dishes, with different colors painted on them.

We continued swinging our metal detectors, hoping to get a signal that said “coin.” We both found several fired bullets larger than a 22, some brass from the end of shotgun shells and more trash.

Susie then found an old button, slightly corroded from being in the ground for many years.

As she searched this area, I continued to wander around the field looking for the other two buildings marked on my map.

I finally came upon a couple pieces of red brick and started looking closer. Soon, many pieces of pottery appeared on top or the ground.

I knew I had found the second old house site.

We spent several more hours detecting this area, but no coins or relics appeared. We were farther back from the road, and the cans had disappeared.

We discovered several more bullets.

Our grandson, Benjamin, and his mom, Angi, (Pendleton Heights High School, Class of 1992) and dad came down from Fort Wayne for Thanksgiving.

He and I went out to the field to see if we could find anything.

He didn’t take his detector but just walked around eyeballing the ground.

He found a lot more pottery pieces than I had, plus many very small pieces of broken dishes and bottles. His eyes are much better than mine.

He also found several broken arrowheads.

I knew from listening to the members of our club they were finding a lot of old coins at these house sites.

I have decades of experience detecting, and good machines, but I wasn’t bringing any coins to see the sunlight again.

Finally, I got a signal on my detector that indicated a nickel. I pinpointed the spot, dug it up, and brought a dirty round item to the surface. I started rubbing dirt off it and saw it was a nickel. More cleaning, and I could read the date. 1989.

What was a fairly new coin doing in my old hunting ground?

We were almost done searching for the day when Benjamin came over to me. He showed me a rusty old item and asked what it was.

After cleaning it up and searching Google, I found it was an old shake hammer. It had a hammer head on one end and a small axe head on the other. It was used to split pieces of wood to make wood shingles or “shakes” for house roofs.

My expensive detector hadn’t found anything good yet, but this old tool was just on top of the ground.

I have continued to search the field for the third house site, but haven’t located it yet.

I have several other places that look promising on the map, but haven’t been able to locate the owners yet to get permission to enter their field.

If any of you readers know of an old field site where we could detect or even an old house still standing with a yard we could search, please let me know.

If you want to help look, we give detecting lessons for free.

Rich Creason is an award-winning outdoors and travel writer whose work has appeared in local, regional, national and international publications during the past 40 years. Born in Anderson and a graduate of Markleville High School, he lives in South Madison County with his wife, Susie. He may be contacted at [email protected].