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| On the hunt! |
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| Got some treasures! |
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| Vintage Christmas treasures |
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| Assorted fun finds |
I took the metal detector out seven times and was able to come up with 213 coins that way. It has been hot, hot, hot this Summer, though, and the ground is pretty well baked dry, so I've had to hunt in playgrounds for the most part, and only for short periods due to the heat. I was able to hunt along an ocean beach last week, and was lucky enough to find a 3-stone diamond necklace in the dry sand. That was a nice find and made the hunt. The Ace 250 detector is pretty limited on the beach, though, it gives a lot of false signals on the wet sand, so I had to stay up on the dry sand. I still was able to find quite a few coins and clean up a lot of pulltabs off the beach. 
An 1885 Pocket Spill - A man using a metal detector found 7 cents in one hole along an old trail through the woods. The coins are dated 1865 to 1885. While not enough to retire on, they still are a neat treasure to find, and make you wonder whose pocket the coins slipped out of on that spot almost 125 years ago. There's tons of it still out there, all around us.
This past weekend was a pretty good treasure hunting one in a strange way. My significant other is the antique hunter and yard sale shopper extraordinaire. I am more the coin and ring hunter, although I've developed a decent eye for antique styles, vintages, and marks over the years. Anyone who spends time pursuing the hobby of treasure hunting in all its forms has "inventory" collected up at home. So when a neighbor announced she was having an impromptu yard sale, we jumped onboard, a good opportunity to sell off some stuff and clear some space. We didn't set up a lot of stuff, and it was a girls thing, so I was dispatched off to do the yard sale hunting, while she conducted the sale. Perhaps a bit perverse, but she didn't want to miss a Saturday's worth of sales, and I was ordered out.
So off I went, and once I scored a $20 Hartstone checked mixing bowl at a moving sale for $1, the blood was flowing. If you are into antiques at all, you know you can never know everything, and you can't be an expert in all fields. At another moving sale, I pulled a porcelain doll out of a bin of junk. The person running the sale had no idea, and thought $1 sounded fair, so the doll came with me too. Dolls are one area I know nothing about, but since she was in good shape, with porcelain head and hands, I figured she's worth more than that. Things slowed down after that as the heat of the day rose. I finally met a nice lady who just wanted to move some items. I got a nice framed print and a wood dough bowl for $1 apiece, and a hanging corner cupboard for $2 (behind the blue pitcher). We kind of lean towards colonial things, so these were all good captures. Finally, as the morning wore down, at a sale with mostly household stuff and perfumes, I saw some old glassware on a table and inspected the blue carnival glass pitcher. Good shape. "Are these cups a set with the pitcher?" "Yes, $10" Hem, haw, but don't put down the pitcher, "OK". done. The blue punch cups are not actually a set with the pitcher, but they are all the same grape leaf pattern. The cups are worth $8 a piece on Replacements.com, and I knew the pitcher was worth a few dollars since we have some experience with carnival glass. Looked it up, it's worth $15-$35 on Ebay. Not bad. 
A treasure hunter armed with a metal detector struck it rich in England recently, digging up a pot filled with over 52,000 Roman coins dated from the 3rd century AD. The pot weighed 350 pounds. The finder, Dave Crisp, dug up a few of the coins, but then called archeologists. The pot and contents have been transferred to the British Museum to be cleaned and catalogued. 
Under Britain's Treasure Act, the finder and the landowner will split any proceeds of the sale of the treasure. Experts have not yet figured out why the coins were buried, or how they got there. According to Roger Bland, a coins expert at the museum, "No one individual could possibly have carried them to the field in the pot, it must have been buried first and then filled up." Not a bad day's work for that treasure hunter! Read more here.
Well, one of the silver linings of the snowy Winter of 2009-2010 is that the ice and snow has been piled around vending machines and parking meters for several weeks. I've heard conjecture in the past that piles of snow would reveal coins when they melt, but I hadn't had the opportunity to test that theory until now. The big thaw isn't here yet, but the snow has been receding enough that I was able to start checking. I'm happy to say that it's true! There were coins everywhere as the snow melted. It was a lot of fun to walk down a row of parking meters and find a coin or two under every other one. I didn't realize people drop so many coins at them, but on the other hand, their fingers are cold or they may be wearing gloves. Once the coin goes into a snowbank, it's pretty much gone. 
quarter fell out. I knew the sound said silver but didn't believe it even after I had the quarter in my hand. You just never know what's going to appear while treasure hunting. As Mel Fisher used to say, "Today's the Day!"
I collected up pictures of all the Indian coins and posted them in an article Native American Coins of the US. The stories behind some of these coins are pretty interesting. The Buffalo nickel came through the efforts of President Teddy Roosevelt, who was an outdoorsman and had traveled in the west. He thought the previous nickels were too plain, and had an engraver study portraits of Indian chiefs to come up with a realistic face on the obverse side. Other coins like the Indian head penny and the $10 gold Eagle pictured here actually portray Lady Liberty wearing an Indian headdress.
One of my favorite moneywalking places is in an airport. I don't go out of my way to go moneywalking there, but if I am there, I do go out of my way to hunt for stray coins, because I know they are there. Airports have several things going for them, they are noisy, many surfaces are carpeted, people are spending money there in food courts, people are in a hurry and carrying bags, and people are lounging around for extended periods. That all adds up to lost coins. 
As always, when one treasure source isn't producing, I can turn to another. This month was a bit of a surprise, we'll get to that in a minute. As I've talked about previously, coin roll hunting is a great way to treasure hunt. I did go through a few boxes of halves but they were very bleak. I think out of 3 boxes, I found one silver half. I did find a 1980 Panama half dollar (in the same box) which was a neat surprise. Does that count as Spanish treasure?
This month I also went through a couple thousand pennies, just to see what's out there. I do look for the error coins, but haven't come up with a penny error yet. I have to admit that's a bit tedious. They can be worth some money though, so I'll probably keep looking for errors and see if it's worth my time. Every type of treasure-hunting isn't for everybody. It's easier to just collect wheat pennies because you can't miss them. You could easily start a coin book for wheats just found through coin roll hunting. I did have more luck with the wheats. They are fun to find. 
Since yard sale season is still a month or two away, there is always thrift store hunting. That's good in any season. If you have a few stores in a reasonable distance from you, they are worth checking out. My better half trolls through them on a regular basis and sometimes turns up a gem or two. Last week, she found a neat old Carnival glass vase. They are called that because they were given out as prizes at carnivals during the Depression. They were also used for cheap giveaways at grocery stores to entice shoppers to come in. Nowadays they can be worth a pretty penny for nice pieces. The vase she turned up is from the 1920's based on the Imperial Glass cross mark on the base. We haven't been able to figure out what it's worth yet, but certainly exponentially more than the $1.90 she paid for it. We have a small collection of Carnival glass, and it really looks good when it's all displayed together. At this point, what it's worth doesn't matter, since it's not going anywhere but into the collection as a piece of found treasure.
So the final type of treasure-hunting I was able to do in January is moneywalking. I've picked up 5 or 10 coins a month off the street when they appear in the path of my daily walks. But I've not had what you could call steady success with moneywalking. I've been reading some other blogs for tips on what other treasure hunters have done to increase their coin finds, and I wanted to test out that theory of finding change in melting snowpiles. I put more emphasis on it this month and did the best I ever have. In January, I was able to find 69 coins. That's like 6 months tallies from 2009. I was amazed, but it truly does work. I only came up with 2 or 3 coins out of snowpiles, so the jury's still out on that. I have concentrated on the ground under parking meters, and that continues to produce pretty well. I expanded my walking range to different streets and that has helped a lot. In my city, though, they are taking out the parking meters one by one and replacing them with 2 or 3 parking machines per block. I thought that would be the death knell for moneywalking in that area. However, last week I decided to start checking them and I've been pleasantly surprised to find coins in the reject slots, and not just grubby pennies. Here's a picture of January's returns just from moneywalking, over $2.00, including an angel token and a wheat penny. That's great, I'm encouraged that this avenue of treasure hunting will be a producer as well, and I haven't even hit my first car wash or drive-through window yet! Ha-ha!
If you have winter cabin fever like I do, here is an easy way to do some treasure hunting at your kitchen table. Take $5 to the bank and ask for pennies. All banks have rolls of pennies. This is an easy and inexpensive way to get your family or kids into coin collecting or treasure hunting. 
There are several ways to approach the hunt. You can buy a penny book at Walmart and see how many slots you can fill. Or you can look for rare coins. Yes, there are still some pretty valuable pennies out there, and some recent ones too. Go to the Professional Coin Grading Service website, click on Price Guide, and then scroll down to Lincoln cents. You can see what the prices are for coins by grade. There are several error varieties out there. The 1999 with wide AM on the reverse is worth a couple hundred, and there are doubled dies listed from the 90's, 80's, 70's and 60's that are worth quite a bit in excellent condition. The 1969-S is worth about $60,000. That would certainly make my day! I keep a list of the potential valuable pennies and put them aside while hunting, then come back with a magnifying glass and check closely at the end. The rest I toss into a bowl. 
The US Mint will introduce a new reverse design on the 2010 pennies that will have a union shield. The first of these pennies was released on February 11, 2010, Lincoln's birthday. Some people also collect pre-1982 cents since they were made of pure copper back then, making each copper penny worth more than 1 cent based on just the copper content. (Now they are made of zinc plated with copper). So you can see there are lots of treasure hunting options. I wonder if we'll be hunting for Memorial-back pennies in ten years? Somehow I doubt it, but you never know!
