Back in 1997 or 98 a couple of detecting buddies and I hunted an old townsite and along the road that ran through it. The name of the town was Prairie Mount and it was about 20 miles west of where I live, but it moved five miles southeast to the Ohio-Mobile railroad when the railroad was built in 1859 and renamed Okolona. Nothing at the original townsite now, or at the time we hunted there but pastures, cows, two old cemeteries and the road, but during the Civil War a running battle went through it. General Nathan Bedford Forest and his troops had headed off General William Smith and his yankee troops, on their way to join Sherman at Meridian, MS when he was on his way to burn Atlanta, several miles south of Prairie Mount and chased them back through Prairie Mount toward Tennessee.
A hunting buddy, Bob, and I hunted around the outside of the cemeteries one Saturday morning and found a few bullets but they were few and far between. At the southeast corner of one of the cemeteries a fairly large tree had been broken off in a storm or rotted down and left a stump. Bob hunted to within a couple of feet of the stump, walked around it and resumed hunting on the other side of it for a few feet before we called it a day. Right after I got home a newbie guy called me, again. He had bought a Fisher CZ 5 a couple of weeks earlier and had been pestering me to take him relic hunting. He had either called or came by my house after work almost every day for over a week, so it was either take him relic hunting or tell him to kiss off, so I agreed to take him the next weekend. I was mean in that I wanted to get rid of him, so I took him to where Bob and I had hunted around the cemeteries because I didn't think he would find anything and would maybe stop pestering me.
The next weekend we walked in to where Bob and I stopped hunting, maybe 10 feet from the stump, and I had to ground balanced the CZ for him. While I was ground balancing the CZ I was using he started swinging toward the stump with his coil at least a foot off the ground. Right by the stump, not much over a foot from where Bob had stopped, he got a signal and yelled, "Hey, I got something." The "something" he got was the MS State Seal belt plate in the photo, only a couple of inches deep and less than two feet from where Bob had stopped the week before. I actually said a dirty word when I saw it, and Bob almost crapped his pants when I showed him the photo and told him he missed the plate by no more than a foot. The photo isn't very good, I didn't have a digital camera back then so I took it with a Polaroid camera and scanned it.
A hunting buddy, Bob, and I hunted around the outside of the cemeteries one Saturday morning and found a few bullets but they were few and far between. At the southeast corner of one of the cemeteries a fairly large tree had been broken off in a storm or rotted down and left a stump. Bob hunted to within a couple of feet of the stump, walked around it and resumed hunting on the other side of it for a few feet before we called it a day. Right after I got home a newbie guy called me, again. He had bought a Fisher CZ 5 a couple of weeks earlier and had been pestering me to take him relic hunting. He had either called or came by my house after work almost every day for over a week, so it was either take him relic hunting or tell him to kiss off, so I agreed to take him the next weekend. I was mean in that I wanted to get rid of him, so I took him to where Bob and I had hunted around the cemeteries because I didn't think he would find anything and would maybe stop pestering me.
The next weekend we walked in to where Bob and I stopped hunting, maybe 10 feet from the stump, and I had to ground balanced the CZ for him. While I was ground balancing the CZ I was using he started swinging toward the stump with his coil at least a foot off the ground. Right by the stump, not much over a foot from where Bob had stopped, he got a signal and yelled, "Hey, I got something." The "something" he got was the MS State Seal belt plate in the photo, only a couple of inches deep and less than two feet from where Bob had stopped the week before. I actually said a dirty word when I saw it, and Bob almost crapped his pants when I showed him the photo and told him he missed the plate by no more than a foot. The photo isn't very good, I didn't have a digital camera back then so I took it with a Polaroid camera and scanned it.
