joe dirt_1
Active member
I love researching sites to hunt almost as much as the actual hunt. With search tools like the internet, the possibilities are endless.
I'm a regular reader here but post very little. I see the great finds made by forum members and the members who post mainly clad finds, not that there's anything wrong with finding clad.
I realize not everyone has lots of sites to hunt and may only have a city park or ball field to hunt that produce nothing but clad coins. A little thinking outside the box can lead you to some
great unhunted sites that can date back 100 years or more. So I thought I'd share some of my research methods I use to find my sites. I've found some great sites using these methods and you can too.
First off, old county atlas books hold a treasure trove of information. They cover all the cities and towns in a particular county and give some very interesting history of every location. You can find these atlas books
online by typing in a year and your county and state in google. As an example, I live near Morgan county Illinois, so I would type "1872 Morgan County Illinois Atlas" in google. They are loaded with old maps that show old schools, churches,
picnic grounds, horse racing tracks, fairgrounds etc. from times past. Lots of these places will no longer exist and are prime hunting sites because very few people even know they existed and modern trash usually isn't a problem at these sites.
Everything you find at these places is going to be old. You can then use Google Earth to get a satellite view of the area and sometimes you will see building foundation outlines that you would never see from the ground. Google Earth will let you overlay
a moderm map over the old maps from the Atlas books allowing you to pinpoint locations you find interesting and also gives you GPS coordinates to narrow it down further. Once you find something interesting, you can use a Plat book from your county to find the landowner
to try to gain permission to hunt the area. I highly recommend you try this method. You will be amazed at what you find within a few miles of where you live.....untouched sites just waiting for you to hunt them.
Another method I use is maps from David Rumsey.com. You can purchase cd's from him that basically are old maps from the atlas books above. The cd I purchased had my county plus 10 other surrounding counties. With shipping the cd was like 12.00 total. You can also
purchase cd's that have the whole state included. I think the cd for all of Illinois was like 69.00. A couple of great sites will pay for the cd's easily.
When I first started detecting over 30 years ago I hunted the parks and schools and found lots of silver and clad. Silver was easier to find back then and it wasn't uncommon to find 10 silver coins each time you went hunting. Today you are lucky to find silver at all let alone 10 in one hunt.
Clad finds are ok, but it does get kinda old digging rotten zinc pennies all day. So this is why I concentrated on finding the older sites that would produce something besides half eaten zinc pennies.
One site I found by using the old atlas books was a small settlement of just a few families. What caught my eye was the mention of having Old Settlers picnics in a grove in 1870 with 600 people attending and having picnic dinners under the big oak trees. More research showed they held
the celebration in the grove till 1877 before it was moved to another location. This means possibly 4000 plus people have been in this grove during those years. I located the grove from the old maps but weeds are chest high now. The land owner is going to mow it hopefully this coming spring.
It should be loaded with coins and artifacts from the thousands of people who were there for the picnic celebrations. At another site on the same farm I found a homesite in a field on a map of the area from 1872. This site produced a 1851 large cent, 1865 2 cent piece, 3 shield nickels, a v nickel,
4 indian head pennies, a toasted 1787 Massachusetts Commonwealth half cent copper, 2 crotal bells, and a neat confederate spur. The landowner is a great guy and gave me permission to hunt all 600 acres of his land anytime I want. The site contains a old church site , a grist mill, 2 stores, a post office, a blacksmith shop and there was a train depot on the site where grain and livestock was shipped in large quantities back in the mid to late 1800's. This is just one site I found by using the old atlas books online. I'm sure others use methods to locate potential hunting sites I might never thought about, so I was hoping some of you would share your methods and favorite sites. I hope my research methods help some that are new to the hobby or old timers for that matter. Great places to hunt still exist, you just have to put forth some effort to locate them............HH
Roger
I'm a regular reader here but post very little. I see the great finds made by forum members and the members who post mainly clad finds, not that there's anything wrong with finding clad.
I realize not everyone has lots of sites to hunt and may only have a city park or ball field to hunt that produce nothing but clad coins. A little thinking outside the box can lead you to some
great unhunted sites that can date back 100 years or more. So I thought I'd share some of my research methods I use to find my sites. I've found some great sites using these methods and you can too.
First off, old county atlas books hold a treasure trove of information. They cover all the cities and towns in a particular county and give some very interesting history of every location. You can find these atlas books
online by typing in a year and your county and state in google. As an example, I live near Morgan county Illinois, so I would type "1872 Morgan County Illinois Atlas" in google. They are loaded with old maps that show old schools, churches,
picnic grounds, horse racing tracks, fairgrounds etc. from times past. Lots of these places will no longer exist and are prime hunting sites because very few people even know they existed and modern trash usually isn't a problem at these sites.
Everything you find at these places is going to be old. You can then use Google Earth to get a satellite view of the area and sometimes you will see building foundation outlines that you would never see from the ground. Google Earth will let you overlay
a moderm map over the old maps from the Atlas books allowing you to pinpoint locations you find interesting and also gives you GPS coordinates to narrow it down further. Once you find something interesting, you can use a Plat book from your county to find the landowner
to try to gain permission to hunt the area. I highly recommend you try this method. You will be amazed at what you find within a few miles of where you live.....untouched sites just waiting for you to hunt them.
Another method I use is maps from David Rumsey.com. You can purchase cd's from him that basically are old maps from the atlas books above. The cd I purchased had my county plus 10 other surrounding counties. With shipping the cd was like 12.00 total. You can also
purchase cd's that have the whole state included. I think the cd for all of Illinois was like 69.00. A couple of great sites will pay for the cd's easily.
When I first started detecting over 30 years ago I hunted the parks and schools and found lots of silver and clad. Silver was easier to find back then and it wasn't uncommon to find 10 silver coins each time you went hunting. Today you are lucky to find silver at all let alone 10 in one hunt.
Clad finds are ok, but it does get kinda old digging rotten zinc pennies all day. So this is why I concentrated on finding the older sites that would produce something besides half eaten zinc pennies.
One site I found by using the old atlas books was a small settlement of just a few families. What caught my eye was the mention of having Old Settlers picnics in a grove in 1870 with 600 people attending and having picnic dinners under the big oak trees. More research showed they held
the celebration in the grove till 1877 before it was moved to another location. This means possibly 4000 plus people have been in this grove during those years. I located the grove from the old maps but weeds are chest high now. The land owner is going to mow it hopefully this coming spring.
It should be loaded with coins and artifacts from the thousands of people who were there for the picnic celebrations. At another site on the same farm I found a homesite in a field on a map of the area from 1872. This site produced a 1851 large cent, 1865 2 cent piece, 3 shield nickels, a v nickel,
4 indian head pennies, a toasted 1787 Massachusetts Commonwealth half cent copper, 2 crotal bells, and a neat confederate spur. The landowner is a great guy and gave me permission to hunt all 600 acres of his land anytime I want. The site contains a old church site , a grist mill, 2 stores, a post office, a blacksmith shop and there was a train depot on the site where grain and livestock was shipped in large quantities back in the mid to late 1800's. This is just one site I found by using the old atlas books online. I'm sure others use methods to locate potential hunting sites I might never thought about, so I was hoping some of you would share your methods and favorite sites. I hope my research methods help some that are new to the hobby or old timers for that matter. Great places to hunt still exist, you just have to put forth some effort to locate them............HH
Roger
