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Message:: [QUOTE="lordmarcovan, post: 3133315, member: 10461"]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 <a href="https://www.pcgs.com/news/a-history-of-major-us-hoards-randall-hoard" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.pcgs.com/news/a-history-of-major-us-hoards-randall-hoard" rel="nofollow">Randall Hoard</a>.  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.[ATTACH=full]799634[/ATTACH] 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.[/QUOTE]

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