Old house site yields one old penny

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When searching online, I discovered the field across the street from my house contained two old houses, according to an 1880 plat map.
This is what I look for when trying to find locations to metal detect.
Friends in our metal detecting club hunt these locations, which are mostly corn and bean fields now.
They come to our meetings showing Indian head pennies, V (Liberty Head) nickels, seated dimes, bust quarters and halves and trade tokens; one lady brought a $1 gold coin she found in a field.
I had to find some of these old coins myself.

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Assorted finds from farm field. 1947 penny and blue bead inside horseshoe. Shake hammer in middle.  Submitted
Assorted finds from farm field. 1947 penny and blue bead inside horseshoe. Shake hammer in middle. Submitted

Last fall, after the beans were picked, I asked the farmer if I could search his field for old stuff.
He said he didn’t see how I could hurt anything, so Susie and I grabbed our metal detectors and started swinging.
The first problem was locating the exact site where the old houses stood. We wandered around the field, getting signals on our machines and digging up torn up pop cans, nuts, bolts and other pieces of farm machinery.
Then, we starting seeing pieces of old, red bricks. This is usually the sign of an old foundation.
As we started searching the area, we noticed it was littered with broken pieces of old heavy pottery. While not worth anything, we began picking up larger pieces to take home. We were told this was the area where we would find the old coins, buttons, and other artifacts left when the house was torn down or burned.
We continued to pick up pottery, broken dishware with blue painted designs, but no coins.
I was finding many new golf balls in this field. Apparently, someone was just hitting the balls into the field and leaving them there.
After two or three hours, I was detecting less and resting more. It was time to walk back home. We dumped our coin pouches onto the tailgate of my truck to see what we had found.
A lot of broken pottery and dishware, a large pile of scrap metal (we always carry out any trash we find), about a dozen golf balls and one coin. It was a new nickel. I don’t know how that found its way into the middle of a bean field.
Susie also had a rusty horseshoe in her stack.
Not what we were hoping to find, but we still had a lot of searching to do.
Our grandson, Benjamin, came down from Fort Wayne the following weekend. He enjoys detecting, so we took him across the road to our field.
Apparently, I missed most of the golf balls on our first day. He found a good spot and we picked up a bunch of these while metal detecting.
After another couple hours of picking up pottery and junk, we located some more red brick. It was the second house site. We filled our coin pouches with broken pieces of dishware and crockery. No coins again. We must be doing something wrong.
Once again, we emptied our pouches on the tailgate and inspected our finds.
Between the three of us, we had picked up 72 gold balls. Susie and I both had unearthed another horseshoe, piles of assorted metal trash, plus she found one old metal button.
Benjamin told us he found something we needed to look at. After some research, I found it was a shake hammer. It had an ax head on one end and a hammer head on the other. There was a hole through the middle for a wooden handle. These tools were used to split wood to make “shakes” or shingles for the house roof.
Winter arrived, and while our detectors work fine in cold weather, I don’t anymore.
Later, our grandson came back to visit and wanted to check the field again. He carried a three-gallon bucket with him and filled it about a third full with red brick, more pottery pieces and a few more golf balls (we have around 100 of these now).
I got a signal on my machine that had a number 24 on the screen. This means a penny when I am hunting a yard or park. This farm field usually meant another kind of trash. I dug it anyway.
Out came a penny! I was hoping it was an Indian head, which is Susie’s favorite coin.
I rubbed the dirt off and found it was a 1947 wheat penny. This is my birth year, so I hoped maybe it would bring good luck. A few minutes later, my machine gave off a dying beep and the screen went black.
I forgot to check my batteries before starting; they were dead.
A good time to head back home. I took a couple puffs on my asthma inhaler and walked back to the truck.
When we head out the next time, I will check the batteries. I’m hoping there are still some old coins in that field.
If any of you readers know of a farm field that used to contain an old homestead and you are willing to let us metal detect it, please contact me.
As always, if you would like to learn to use a detector, we would be glad to teach you.
Rich Creason is an award-winning outdoors and travel writer whose work has appeared in local, regional, national and international publications for 40 years. Born in Anderson, he is a graduate of Markleville High School. He lives in South Madison County with his wife, Susie. He may be contacted at [email protected].

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