Post by speekergeek on Mar 12, 2004 21:52:54 GMT -5
Hunting Homesteads: The Bare Basics
If you ever want to see the eyeballs of guy with a detector in his hand roll back into his head, point him toward an old homestead or farmstead with nothing remaining except the foundations. I’ve seen some of these guys. They trudge up to the place and start swinging away willy-nilly, and always right up against the inner and outer edges of the foundation walls. They swing the perimeter of the walls and then up and leave, sometimes without finding a thing, other times after finding a mountain of iron trash.
Foundations are but just one element of a homestead site, and almost without exception they’re not even the best part of a site to hunt. While people certainly do find coins and relics along the outer edges of foundations, the larger majority of attractive finds will be found some distance away. Instead, foundations (and even iron trash) are more useful as a diagnostic tool by which to approximately date a site and begin to get a feel for the economic status of the people who once lived there and what activities made up their daily lives. With this information, you’ll begin to get a handle on what you might expect to find (or not find) at a given site, and where.
As it goes with tipsy men- and womenfolk in gin joints at closing time, better judgement when it comes to foundation sites often tends to get clouded. All farmsteads and homesteads aren’t the same, and for many of us, dancing with an ugly date isn’t the best use of our detecting time. Unlike that well-manicured Victorian down the street, disappeared and abandoned steads require a healthy dose of observation and forethought that only comes with leaving your detector at home. In fact, these sites deserve more than one visit without a detector in your hand before you spend your time actually hunting them.
Your Mileage May Vary
While all steads could conceivably hold older coins and relics, not every part of every stead is worth your consideration if your weekly hunting time is limited. If you have the kind of time or desire it takes to scrub every inch of every site you come across, any discussion of what constitutes high potential is pretty moot since you’re going to hunt ‘em all anyway simply because you can. But if you’re someone like me who’s raising a family in a handyman’s dream of a house, you have to use your time as productively as you can because you don’t have much time to begin with.
This means carefully choosing the small crescents of highest-potential ground within the highest-potential sites you can find. And sometimes it means passing on a site completely because there are sites with higher promise elsewhere.
Of course, there are those in this hobby who would argue that the thrill of the hunt and getting a dose of fresh air is really all that matters in the end, not whether you actually find something worth dragging home every time out. Excuse the vernacular, but this is a boatload of crapola that’s little more than an excuse for a lack of research time or the inability (or totally ignoring the need) to carefully survey the surroundings and read what the land and the remaining structure is telling you. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t spend hundreds of dollars on some of the finest consumer electronics technology known to modern man to spend my time singing with the birds and being a feeding station for mosquitoes. There are cheaper ways to take a walk in the woods.
Nay, I want to find as much good stuff as often as I can in the little hunting time my wife allows me. And in my definition, good stuff doesn’t include horseshoes and doors to potbelly stoves.
There will be some times, though, when you will want to intentionally dig up this kind of iron trash before anything else to try to re-create, as best as you can, life as it was when the site was a living, breathing stead. This comes in handy for overgrown sites where nothing remains but the barest of shallow ground depressions where buildings of some sort once stood. In cases like these, you want to know which was the house and which was the pig sty. The iron trash immediately surrounding the area will help identify what kind of activity was going on at each spot.
Being able to roughly date an abandoned stead is important. Knowing how long it was inhabited will allow you to set some reasonable expectations of what you might find. Two of the most basic and reliable signs are the type of foundation blocks (if any) used to elevate the wood cabin off the ground to deter moisture and vermin damage, and the type of nails used to tack things together. Foundation types and site ages discussed in the archived Gazette article, "Use Home Foundations To Date Your Sites" apply out in the countryside as well. The nails you find when first assessing the site will also give an indication of the age. Headless, square-cut nails were used into the 1920s, when the round-headed nails we use these days began to be widely distributed.
If you ever want to see the eyeballs of guy with a detector in his hand roll back into his head, point him toward an old homestead or farmstead with nothing remaining except the foundations. I’ve seen some of these guys. They trudge up to the place and start swinging away willy-nilly, and always right up against the inner and outer edges of the foundation walls. They swing the perimeter of the walls and then up and leave, sometimes without finding a thing, other times after finding a mountain of iron trash.
Foundations are but just one element of a homestead site, and almost without exception they’re not even the best part of a site to hunt. While people certainly do find coins and relics along the outer edges of foundations, the larger majority of attractive finds will be found some distance away. Instead, foundations (and even iron trash) are more useful as a diagnostic tool by which to approximately date a site and begin to get a feel for the economic status of the people who once lived there and what activities made up their daily lives. With this information, you’ll begin to get a handle on what you might expect to find (or not find) at a given site, and where.
As it goes with tipsy men- and womenfolk in gin joints at closing time, better judgement when it comes to foundation sites often tends to get clouded. All farmsteads and homesteads aren’t the same, and for many of us, dancing with an ugly date isn’t the best use of our detecting time. Unlike that well-manicured Victorian down the street, disappeared and abandoned steads require a healthy dose of observation and forethought that only comes with leaving your detector at home. In fact, these sites deserve more than one visit without a detector in your hand before you spend your time actually hunting them.
Your Mileage May Vary
While all steads could conceivably hold older coins and relics, not every part of every stead is worth your consideration if your weekly hunting time is limited. If you have the kind of time or desire it takes to scrub every inch of every site you come across, any discussion of what constitutes high potential is pretty moot since you’re going to hunt ‘em all anyway simply because you can. But if you’re someone like me who’s raising a family in a handyman’s dream of a house, you have to use your time as productively as you can because you don’t have much time to begin with.
This means carefully choosing the small crescents of highest-potential ground within the highest-potential sites you can find. And sometimes it means passing on a site completely because there are sites with higher promise elsewhere.
Of course, there are those in this hobby who would argue that the thrill of the hunt and getting a dose of fresh air is really all that matters in the end, not whether you actually find something worth dragging home every time out. Excuse the vernacular, but this is a boatload of crapola that’s little more than an excuse for a lack of research time or the inability (or totally ignoring the need) to carefully survey the surroundings and read what the land and the remaining structure is telling you. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t spend hundreds of dollars on some of the finest consumer electronics technology known to modern man to spend my time singing with the birds and being a feeding station for mosquitoes. There are cheaper ways to take a walk in the woods.
Nay, I want to find as much good stuff as often as I can in the little hunting time my wife allows me. And in my definition, good stuff doesn’t include horseshoes and doors to potbelly stoves.
There will be some times, though, when you will want to intentionally dig up this kind of iron trash before anything else to try to re-create, as best as you can, life as it was when the site was a living, breathing stead. This comes in handy for overgrown sites where nothing remains but the barest of shallow ground depressions where buildings of some sort once stood. In cases like these, you want to know which was the house and which was the pig sty. The iron trash immediately surrounding the area will help identify what kind of activity was going on at each spot.
Being able to roughly date an abandoned stead is important. Knowing how long it was inhabited will allow you to set some reasonable expectations of what you might find. Two of the most basic and reliable signs are the type of foundation blocks (if any) used to elevate the wood cabin off the ground to deter moisture and vermin damage, and the type of nails used to tack things together. Foundation types and site ages discussed in the archived Gazette article, "Use Home Foundations To Date Your Sites" apply out in the countryside as well. The nails you find when first assessing the site will also give an indication of the age. Headless, square-cut nails were used into the 1920s, when the round-headed nails we use these days began to be widely distributed.
