Digger's Diary flashback: "The Small Squares of Brunswick- First Digs of 2008 (January, 2008)

December, 2016: here's yet another oldie, salvaged from Collectors Universe, where most of my old dig stories lie with dead pictures. I think I already posted this one here on CoinTalk in response to a discussion about Knights of Pythias medals, but oh well, here it is again.

DIGS O' THE DAY (2008-01-10): THE SMALL SQUARES OF BRUNSWICK- FIRST DIGS OF 2008

Thursday, January 10, 2008 was a postcard-perfect day in the Golden Isles of Georgia. It was sunny and clear, with temperatures around 70 degrees. A few days earlier, we’d had a fierce cold snap, and the temperatures dropped into the 20s. Unfortunately the three-day hard freeze coincided with my family reunion, so my poor relatives from out of state didn’t get to experience any of our nice, mild winter weather. My young nephews decided to change the name of our city from Brunswick to BRRRunswick!

Wouldn’t you know it- as soon as they left, it warmed up again. Pity for them, but good news for me, as it bode well for my first detector outing of 2008. I decided to return to Gascoigne Bluff on St. Simons Island. There I tried out the new detector sling my online digging pal Jerry Crocker had sent me, since I had complained of arm fatigue from swinging the heavy Garrett GTI-2500. While I didn’t feel the need to use the new sling much, I’m sure it will come in handy for some of those longer outings, particularly if I am relic hunting with the really large coil on the machine. Gascoigne, though a beautiful place, was boring me. I only poked around for a half hour or so there, getting no promising signals. I wanted to chase some old coins, so I packed up and returned to the mainland to try my hand in the Squares of Old Town in Brunswick.

I brought with me another recent gift: a handsome bronze medal. It was from another online friend, Doug Smith. He said he enjoyed my digging stories, and sent the medal along to bring me luck on my next outing. It actually did just that, and in an interesting way- but let’s not get too far ahead in the story.





Brunswick’s "Signature Squares" were first laid out by the British just prior to the Revolution, in a very similar plan to that of Savannah. The squares are parks, and have been productive detecting sites for me and many others over the past thirty years or so. What many people do not realize, however, is that Brunswick has a number of much smaller squares which do not show up on some maps, and are practically indistinguishable from vacant lots, since they’re roughly the same size as many of the lots surrounding them. Sometimes what appears to be a gap between buildings or a vacant lot between houses is in fact one of the smaller squares. Having a park permit and knowing the location of the lesser-known squares has given me some less-exploited ground to hunt. Even so, I have focused mostly on the big squares until they’re worked to death, and haven’t paid enough attention to the little ones.

Many of the squares near the business district are getting facelifts and new landscaping. A month or so back, I had noticed they were installing a new fountain in Jekyll Square, which is one of the smaller squares, situated right next to the public library. I had poked around for about five minutes the last time I was here, and dug a 1911 Wheat cent. Today, on my way through town, I thought I’d see if the work had been finished around the fountain, or if I still had exposed dirt to play in. As it happened, I did, so I stopped and began searching.





The bare dirt in the square was full of construction trash and lots of hardware like pipe fittings and nuts and bolts. The first find of the day turned out to be dated, but it was just a little piece of brass with the date "Nov 5 00" on it, presumably meaning 2000 rather than 1900. Some modern cents came up reluctantly, and a couple more lay on the surface. Then I found what had obviously been part of the temperature dial from an old oven. The area around the new fountain was relatively free of signals, except for some pipes. The dirt there may have been brought in from somewhere else.

My father, who is the director of the library, strolled by with another gentleman, and we had a nice, brief conversation. They wished me luck and headed to a nearby restaurant for a business lunch.

I noticed a bare patch alongside the wall of an adjacent building, where an old sidewalk had once been. Anytime an old sidewalk is lifted, it's like opening a time capsule.



Hoping there were goodies lost there before the sidewalk was put down in a bygone era (before pulltabs!), I focused on the area. Soon a large piece of copper, probably part of an old pipe, turned up. Then a rivet, of the type used in leatherworking in the 1800s.

I spotted another 19th century artifact on the surface- it looked like a piece of coal at first, but I realized it was "black" glass. It was part of the pontil of a mid-1800s wine bottle. When you hold the old "black" glass to the light, you can see it's actually a really dark green. It's also a certain indicator of a 19th century site, although I needed no confirmation of that, since a lot of the buildings downtown were built in the 1880s.

The next item was far older, but it wasn't an artifact. It was, surprisingly, a fossil. I noticed the sand bed beneath where the old sidewalk had been was full of bits of seashell, so I knew they'd used dredge spoil material from the bottom of the bay as fill here at some point. One can often find fossils and shark teeth in our sand roads because of this.

I saw black specks in the sand and knew it contained tiny bits of fossils, so I kept a sharp eye out for shark teeth. Sure enough, I spotted one. It was totally exposed on the surface, but it was a teeny-tiny little thing- about as small as they come!



I soon got tired and restless at Jekyll Square. It was difficult hunting through the trash, and I was getting relatively few clear and repeatable signals (just a lot of "ear-blasters" and chatter and sporadic signals from all the junk). I decided to move on to another small square.

I ended up at Satilla Square, the eastern portion of which is surrounded by 1880s and 1890s-vintage Victorian homes. I do love being in an old Victorian neighborhood with my detector!

I've hunted this particular spot before, and turned up some Wheat cents and a button from the 1940s in the past, but it hadn't given me much else of interest. However, I knew from its proximity to the old houses that there had to be some older artifacts and coins buried nearby. Maybe I would finally coax a silver coin from the ground here, who knows?

I began on the northern edge of the square, alond the boundary curb. A modern Memorial cent turned up. In one hole, a pretty blue-swirled glass marble popped out as I dug up a piece of older junk. In another hole, as I dug another piece of junk, an old white pottery sherd came out.

A man stood on the porch of a pink house nearby, on the southern edge of the square. I stayed on the opposite side, so as not to make him jittery. But then he got in his truck and left, waving and smiling as he drove away. So if the neighbors were friendly, and this particular person was no longer home, I figured I would hunt the southern edge of the park closest to his driveway, staying in the public area, of course.

A granite curb separated the driveway from the park, so I began to work along the square's boundary at a slow pace.

Quite soon I got a signal, and the first "decent" one of the day. It registered in the coin range, bouncing around "quarter" and "half dollar" on the meter, and the detector's "imaging" feature said it was a Size B (coin-sized) target at five inches. The audio was a little softer, which is a good indication of something with a little depth. It was a clear and repeatable signal, too.

Finally! A signal with possibilities! I can often tell the good ones before I even dig them, and this one had me salivating in anticipation.

I cut out a plug of sod.





I turned over the plug and checked it with the detector. Nothing there.

Then I rechecked the hole and got a reassuringly clear beep. The target was still down there in the ground.

Looking into the bottom of the hole, I thought I saw the edge of something round... just barely. I couldn't tell for sure.





So I reached into the hole and scooped up some loose dirt with my fingers.

Immediately a surge of adrenaline ran through me, because I could see the edge of a coinlike object... and it was BIG!

It was bigger than a half dollar, but not quite silver dollar size.





My brain raced through the possibilities, but since the object was obviously copper or bronze, and bigger than the largest copper and bronze coins ever struck by the US Mint, I knew it had to be foreign, or a token or medal of some sort.

Interesting!

I saw that it featured a knight's helmet and crossed axes (or halberds). When I turned it over, I could see that it was dated "1864-1914". So it apparently had been struck to commemorate some fiftieth anniversary... back in 1914! Also, it had an interesting multi-sided edge.






Since it had popped right out of the dirt at the bottom of the hole, and hadn't required any further digging, I was able to drop the plug right back into place, with no stray dirt left on the surface. It was a perfect, near-invisible plug. I wish I could say they all came out that way. I do try to be tidy, but nobody gets it right all the time. If all of my plugs looked like this, nobody would ever know I'd been around. This was nice soil- the last site I'd hunted had sandy soil so loose that many of the plugs crumbled away when removed from the ground.






I hunted a short while longer, with visions of Barber dimes and Indian cents and Seated Liberty coins dancing through my head, but it was soon time to go home. The adrenaline rush of finding the big medal, coupled with the day's physical exertion, had taken its toll, and I decided to call it a day.

I didn't get silvered, but I got a "keeper", and something I consider as good as a silver coin, anyway.

I call the day a modest success, and it was thoroughly enjoyable.





Upon returning home, I cleaned the medal with a fine brass brush and treated it with a little petroleum jelly. It was in good condition for a ground find, and almost as nicely preserved as the pristine, exceptional 1907 Indian cent I'd dug on my previous outing to London Street.

Initially, when examining what appeared to be a church spire on one side of the medal, and the letters "F B C" on the other side, I thought it might commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the First Baptist Church. However, I soon found out that our local First Baptist was established a little before 1864, so that was out. Additionally, I couldn't figure out what the letters "KP" on the dated side meant.

Some Internet searching, using the various letters and dates as keywords, revealed some strikingly similar medals from a fraternal organization called the Knights of Pythias. Eventually I was able to find an identical medal in an eBay auction, so the identity of my find was quickly confirmed. It is a golden jubilee medal of the Knights of Pythias, issued in 1914. I love it when everything clicks into place and I'm able to pin down the background on some of my finds.

The Knights of Pythias was the first fraternal organization to receive a charter from the U.S. Congress, and Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Warren G. Harding, and William McKinley were among the more famous Pythian Knights of the past. The organization exists to this day, and had a membership of more than 50,000 as of 2003. It turns out that the "F C B" (not "F B C", as I'd originally thought) stands for "Friendship, Charity, and Benevolence".





Not a bad start to the year's digging, I say.


~RWS