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Message:: [QUOTE="lordmarcovan, post: 3137732, member: 10461"]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.[/QUOTE]

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