Metal Detecting - Update On Crusty Coin Find - 1853 Surprise!

Say, @paddyman98 - dug any Seated silver yet? At the rate you’re going, I’d say that’s inevitable, if you keep putting the coil to the soil in those older, less-exploited sites...

Edit- never mind- I forgot about your 1861 dime. So go get a Seated quarter now, or a Capped Bust coin!
I’m rootin’ for ya there! Can’t wait to see it happen for you. In the Big Apple, I think it will, eventually.

My all-time tally on those:

Seated quarter: 1 - A well-worn 1855 w/Arrows piece found in Dandridge, TN.

Bust coins: 1 - a holed 1829 half dime found in Fletcher, NC.

The Bust half dime was crazy-shallow- in the grassroots- and rang as a “pulltab” on the meter. At that depth (<1/2”), I thought for sure it was gonna be a pulltab. Pleasant surprise!

Always dig the “pulltab” signals when you’re in less trashy areas. Or at least when they have a little depth to them, like below 2” or so. All my half dimes and many of my Indian cents rang in at that “pulltab” range on the meter. Some were shockingly shallow.

Small gold is also in that low- to mid-range, too. And many of the nice old military buttons. In parks, I typically used very low discrimination (just enough to block out small rusty iron like nails and bottle caps), and watched the meter for clues to interpret. When in doubt, dig! But you knew that.

The Seated half dimes I dug in subsequent years were also really shallow. I guess those tiny, lightweight coins didn’t always settle in the ground so deeply, or came back up due to frost heave during their century-plus in the soil.

How deep was your large cent? My first (the Draped Bust from that Rev War shipyard site) was 8” to 10” down, but still gave a solid, repeatable signal. The other two I found on bulldozed sites, so they weren’t as deep.

 

That shoe(?) buckle looks early! Like 1700s-early. Early 1800s at the latest, I’d guess. Mind you, that’s a guess. I’m no authority on them. But I’ve seen several from colonial sites that had a very similar appearance, with teeth/tines like that. And it has that whitish patina one often sees on relics that spent 200 years in the ground.

The harmonica reeds are very common finds on 19th sites. I once read a relic hunter jokingly suggest that during the Civil War era, owning a harmonica must have once been a requirement for citizenship, since those reeds so often turn up.

 

PS- I never found a whole harmonica. Just those reeds like that. Ditto pocket watches. Dug many an empty pocket watch case, or the movement, but never the whole watch.

Out of the thousands of relics I dug, of every description, one other thing I never found was a whistle (as in police whistle or referee whistle). That’s the sort of thing you’d expect to find at least once over a quarter century of detecting.

Also, I never chanced across a silver Washington from the 1930s. Found Seated, Barber, and Standing Liberty quarters, and silver Washies from the ‘40s and later (not to mention hundreds of clads, of course), but never a 1930s quarter.

The 1840s (any type of coin) is another decade I never happened to find, though I covered every other decade of US coinage (if you count my dateless Draped Bust large cent as potentially being from either the 1790s or first decade of the 1800s).