I made it back out to the site where I have found almost a dozen flat buttons (including one Tombac), some lead farm or communion tokens, and an 1822 large cent. The buttons just keep on coming. No coins this time, but another half dozen buttons including another Tombac (small), and a white metal fancy. I should’ve taken a good picture of the front of the fancy before I started cleaning it. It was pretty well caked and I didn’t realize there was a pattern to it. It has a sawtooth-like pattern around the rim with several concentric fine lines inside that crossed with slanted spokes. The inner circle is surrounded by a coiled rope (?), and the very center appears to have dots like the center of a flower or sunflower.

With the exception of the one that is punched through, these buttons all appear to be alpha shank or cone and wire eye. This would date them to the late 1700s to early 1800s for manufacture date.

I am digging pretty much everything at this location now. Consequently I dug a large iron target that kept giving intermittent good signals. That was the large chain which has some sort of eyelet bolt attached to the link near the red leaf in the lower left corner. I’m only posting it because I understand some people can identify chains and approximate age based on pattern. If there’s enough here to go on, I would be curious to see if this dates to the same general time period.

Thanks for looking, and happy hunting!

Definitely some old buttons there…was this an old house site?
That broken button looks like a Tombac too, but I am no expert.
Interesting finds..

Thanks! If it was a house, it was rather small. Someone suggested the chain might be from an old trap. So I’m wondering if maybe it was a one room trapper’s cabin.