The Sharpsburg Story

Am I?

OK, if you insist.

I don't have any, but here's one @MontCollector gave away in my January giveaway.

 

After an hour's drive from the greater Atlanta area, I met Blue Cole in Sharpsburg. We chatted for a few minutes and then proceeded to get out our metal detecting equipment.

The first place he took me was, I believe, somewhere around the site of the town's long-vanished railroad depot. Blue was a novice detectorist at the time, as I recall, so perhaps I told some dig stories to whet his appetite, and listened to some of his stories about the town's history to whet my own.

One tale that was not told by either of us (because I had not yet read about it myself) was the story of the Randall Hoard. The Randall Hoard was a keg of 1816-1820 US Coronet Head large cents, all Uncirculated, that were reportedly found beneath a railroad platform in Georgia in the 19th century. I believe most of the surviving Mint State large cents of those particular years came from the Randall Hoard.

A Randall Hoard cent.



So what does the Randall Hoard have to do with this Sharpsburg Story? Nothing, unfortunately, except as an indication of the sort of things that might be hiding in the vicinity of long-vanished railroad depots in old Georgia towns. It's certain we'd have both daydreamed or talked about the Randall Hoard if we had known the story then.

We poked around near where the depot had once been - or that's what I recall hearing Blue say the place was, anyway. I'm not really sure. I do recall some railroad tracks and lots of high weeds.

Near there, we explored around behind a derelict building for a bit. I can't remember what sort of targets I dug, so they must not have been anything remotely interesting. I have near-photographic recall of the discovery of almost all of my more interesting finds over the past quarter-century, even the ones that were monetarily worthless. (I dig for excitement and don't usually sell my finds, so the monetary value of my finds is a merely a mental scorecard anyway.)

Blue might have dug a rusty iron horse or ox shoe - or I might have heard him talking about finding a horse shoe on an earlier occasion, or I might be misremembering that whole conversation entirely. But I know I didn't find anything worth noting on the "depot" site, or whatever that first site we hunted was.

It wasn't long before we decided to move on to another site.

 

I'm an infamous prankster who has "seeded" many a fun find for a novice friend to discover, but I always confessed the deed soon afterward (by the end of the day, at least), so as not to give anyone false confidence. And I always let them keep the silver goodies I'd salted the soil with.

 

Sorry, it's still up here (*taps noggin).

Haven't forgotten. Alas, today was not the best for storytelling.

I shall plead Monday as my excuse, and get on with it as soon as I can.

 

Under the weather. Will rejoin y'all later.

 

Blue and I moved on to another spot. I'm sorry to say I can't remember the name of the road it was on. Not that that should matter much to any of y'all reading this, but I wanted to see if I could find it online with Google Maps and see the Street Views of the site. But since this outing happened sixteen years ago and I haven't spoken to Blue Cole in probably fifteen, I now couldn't tell you exactly where this place was.

I do recall that it was two vacant lots adjoining each other. They were grassy and open, but I think there were a few hickory or pecan trees on them. These definitely had the look of old town lots where houses had once stood. Blue said there had been an old (probably Victorian-era) house on at least one of the lots, which had burned down sometime around the 1950s.

"Victorian house" is music to my ears when I'm in coinshooting mode. "Burned down", not so much, because when a building is consumed by fire and subsequently demolished, lots of nails and wiring and other bits of melted metal can end up in the ground, which can cause considerable distraction to one's detector. Fortunately this is not always the case.

These lots were higher than the street level by perhaps four to six feet, so there was a retaining wall at the front of each, where the road was. While walking around on these somewhat elevated lots, we could look across the roof of the single-story building across the street.

We started detecting, or "putting the coil to the soil", as I like to call it. For the site of a supposed house fire, the first lot we hunted was surprisingly "clean", which is to say it did not produce a lot of detector signals. That was true of the other lot as well.

I told Blue that finding silver - or his first Wheat cent, anyway - was very likely on such a site. Yards around old houses are some of my favorite places to metal detect, whether the house still stands or not.

We never did find that Wheat cent that I thought so likely. In fact, we didn't even find a modern cent. As I recall, I did find one modern quarter, stained a brownish color by the soil. The copper-nickel alloy of such modern coins soon turns dark when buried in the ground, whereas earlier silver coins often remain bright and whitish. So you can usually tell a silver coin from a copper-nickel one the moment it comes out of the ground.

Blue got a coin-like signal near the front edge of one lot, near the dropoff of the retaining wall. I came over to help him pinpoint it.

When it was recovered, we saw a dark greyish disc come out of the loose dirt in the hole. It had the dimensions of a coin - somewhere between the size of a quarter and a half dollar, perhaps. It didn't shine like silver, and was a much darker color than the clad quarter I had just found.

 

The author wishes to apologize for the stalling of the narrative. You see, I wanted to post pictures of the stuff that was found, but I realized that those items are packed away in a box somewhere. (We're moving soon.)

So I'll resume the tale when I can.

 

I can probably find a photo that resembles the item Blue just dug in our last installment, so maybe (just maybe) I can crank out a segment over the weekend and at least reveal that...