Beef Up Your Detecting Skills With Public Sites

Want to become a hardened detectorist in no time, doing things that’ll build and challenge your detecting skills, truly test your dedication to this hobby and, best of all, turn you into a better detectorist? Concentrate on hunting public property sites like parks, public school grounds, very old swimming holes, old library and town hall grounds, and grass parkways between the street and sidewalk. Not just hunting any old one of them, but hunting for the best of them.

Anyone can pick out a few of the oldest houses in any neighborhood, get permission to hunt and come away with an assortment of goodies. But does that necessarily make you an accomplished treasure hunter? Nope; no more than taking a fishing pole to a stocked pay-to-fish pond would make you an accomplished angler. Come to think of it, we have a lot in common with people who go fishing. The people who are really good at it, especially the ones who compete at the pro tournament level, don’t get that good by propping up a cane pole in a forked stick on the bank and catching a nap under a tree. They can step off a plane anywhere in the country, read any lake or river and hunt down the fat ones.

In metal detecting, anyone with any degree of skill can find something old at an old house with a tended lawn. Doing this is all well and good (especially if you’re a beginner and need to build your confidence), and it can certainly lead to some impressive personal coin and backyard relic collections. But does this in itself build you into a coin and relic hunter? No. It just makes you someone who’s good at the metal detecting equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.

But, some would argue, isn’t this what successful detecting is all about? Well, in some respects yes, but in many more respects it isn’t, because you won’t always have a plum Victorian house with a trash-free lawn to hunt. Especially if you end up joining a detecting club that likes to hunt a wide variety of sites over hill and dale, or simply run out of owners willing to let you dig holes in their lawns. If you take a weekend fisherman who fishes nothing but small inland lakes or ponds and plunk him down on a river bank, he’ll be completely lost and come away skunked at the end of the day.

The common perception among detectorists is that as sites go, hunting public property comes close to scraping the bottom of the barrel. These sites are dreadfully full of metallic trash, have often been hunted to death for years, and rarely hold quality coins or relics. This may be generally true, but it's not specifically always true. Depending on what was there or even nearby at one time in your local history, this may not be true at all.

Public site truisms typically apply when you just pick any old place at random and only search the really obvious places, such as around benches, picnic tables, trees and picnic shelters. If you don’t know how (or more importantly when) to look for the public-access sites with the most potential for good finds in the first place, you’ll end up, as they used to say in my neighborhood, busted and disgusted. The key to winning the war of public property sites is to pick your battles very carefully.

This all starts with research. Some of us would sooner hack off an arm than do research. If you’re one, the bad news is it’s a necessary evil. The good news, however, is "research" often doesn’t get more involved than looking through a collection of locally historic photographs for potential sites, making a photocopy of them, locating the sites on a current street map and then comparing what’s in the photo to what’s there now. Old public property sites to watch for include:

• City parks. Even I have a general dread for these sites, especially if I know nothing about their history. But if a park was all I had, though, I’d choose one across the street from the oldest homes in town. Especially if the parks contain (or once contained) field houses, large cement wading pools, concession stands, baseball diamonds, observation decks. The bottoms of long-established toboggan runs or sledding hills can be among your best finds because of the potential bonanza of coins and jewelry lost from the fingers and pockets of sledders during the winter. They also tend to be slightly less trashy than other areas within the same park because they're in the wide open and away from where the crowds fling around pull tabs and that Grand Satan of all aluminum trash: the Snapple cap.

• Old railroad depots. While depots, the rails and the rights of way next to them are private, railroad-owned property, quite a few were either adjacent to or very near small public parks or large vacant (and if you’re really lucky, they’ll still be vacant) grassy areas that passed for local parks among the local kids.

But that’s not the attractive feature about old railroad depots, especially those torn down many decades ago. In recent years here in the United States, local urban communities, in their quest for more green space, have been turning miles upon miles of former railroad line into public bicycle paths and hiking trails. These days, railroading just ain’t what it used to be, so many railroads are stuck with an overabundance of weed-infested trackage that hasn’t seen a live engine in years. Railroad company accountants and lawyers don’t like the kind of financial drain and personal injury liability that comes with maintaining (or not maintaining) crossing grades, signals, trackage and railbeds of these ghost lines. So in a flash of good neighborliness, the railroads have been removing the rails, paving over the crossing grades and either donating or selling off cheap the entire rights of way to local government agencies for recreational use.

If you live in one of these areas, local historical photos will tell you if and where there was a passenger or freight depot along what is now very huntable public property.

• Groves or meadows in parks or forest preserves once used for large family or community gatherings before the days of home air conditioning and TV. Find these park or woodland social areas (either through library research or simply talking to some nearby old folk) in or nearest to the section of town with the oldest homes and you’ll be on the trail of older coins and pocket relics such as watch fobs and tokens.

However, given the choice between a park and woods, go with the woods. As always, the older the neighborhood, the better. Find the social gathering areas and you’ll be on your way because these sites will either be overgrown from years of disuse, or still wide open but off the beaten trail far enough to be forgotten or largely undiscovered by new residents who have better things to do than talk with old people. For a lot of casual detectorists, trailblazing through the woods is more trouble than its worth. Invariably, they’ll head off to somewhere less challenging, like the city park, leaving any goodies to be found by someone with more spunk. Someone like you.

• Roadway bridges over creeks. This one’s a sleeper few people think of. Yeah, there might be a four-lane main drag leading into town, but it wasn’t always a four-lane drag. If the road has some odd twists and turns to it, it was almost certainly once a dirt Indian trail that later became a main wagon path used by early settlers who may or may not have spoken with forked tongue.

When it came to crossing creeks, Indians had an easier time of it. They just rode their horses across. Early settlers -- what with their wagons loaded down with upright pianos, armoires big enough to bury the whole family in, and crates full of china with Currier and Ives prints of quaint country scenes -- had to lug all this crap across the creek. This provided much amusement for the local tribes, who fell off their horses having big laughs inventing the Indian equivalent of "dumkopf" while watching paleface’s wagons sink up to their axles in sand and mud. Eventually, the white guys wised up and built log or plank bridges across the creek. Some enterprising pioneers even hatched the idea to charge tolls for crossing these early bridges. It might've seemed like a good idea at the time, but nobody made much of a living at it at first because it sometimes took years for the next pioneer family to wander by.

Many years later, the road-building branches of local and state governments, ever vigilant for the path of least resistance, found it was just cheaper and easier to build two lane roads over the original dirt path and spare itself the cost and headache of tossing people off their land so it could have a nice straight road instead.

Still, buried in creek beds directly beneath our modern two- and four-lane roadway bridge overpasses are still a few old coins or relics (maybe even an old piano or two) remaining from the days of plank and log bridges. Best of all, creeks are public waterways, so you’re welcome to hunt them any time. (Note: Don’t try hunting mud-bottomed creeks -- even the shallow ones. For obvious reasons, this is quite dangerous.) Concentrate first on detecting a dead-center line down the middle of the overpass, no matter how many traffic lanes it has. This is where the original trail was, and things would have fallen under or been pitched over the sides of the original log or plank bridges. Then fan out a few feet of either side of this line, and finish your hunt with a search of the nearby creek banks.

• Grass parkways in front of old homes. Parkways -- those little strips of grass between street curb and sidewalk -- are public property and have been known to swallow their share of pocket goodies dropped by pedestrians and people getting in and out of cars. The older the home, the older the finds.

Keep in mind that while these grassy areas are public property, a lot of homeowners consider them extensions of their yards. After all, they’re the ones who have to do the mowing and prune back the trees, not the town. So if a homeowner decides to get surly about it, just move on. In most cases, though, homeowners won’t pay you any mind. If you’re lucky, a few may even express an interest in what you’re doing and allow you to hunt their yard.

• Public school grounds. These are largely hit or miss propositions depending on what you’re hunting for. Any schoolyard is a coinshooter’s paradise. In general, though, the older the school, the more likely it is you’ll find relics, not old coins. This is because parents didn’t start sending their kids to school with pocket change (usually milk money) and doling out allowances until the 1950s. Before end of World War II, everyone fell somewhere between hard up and just plain poor. If mom and dad had any change sitting around the house, an irresponsible 7-year-old with a hole in his pocket would’ve been the last person they’d entrust it to. Find a school that dates back to 1966 or earlier and you may find your share of silver.

There’s my short ‘A’ List, with the exception of old public libraries, town halls and swimming holes because they pretty much speak for themselves. With a little thought, logic and attention to the very small details that say a lot in old town photographs (pay very close attention to what’s in the background), you might be able to come up with possibilities that haven't occurred to me yet.

Over the past year, however, I’ve learned a very painful lesson about research: There’s a vast chasm between reality and what you find in books, newspaper clippings and photos. Nine and a half times out of 10 ( 9 times out of 10 if it’s a really good day), your sites will have been paved over or reconstructed beyond all reasonable hope of finding anything other than clads. Everything else will have been torn down for a sewage treatment plant.

That’s why it’s important that once you get a list of potential sites from the past, find out what’s now there on a day when it’s too cold, too rainy or too hot to go detecting. If you only get a few hours to detect on a Sunday afternoon, you don’t want to blow your precious detecting time driving out to those six sites built in the 1910s to find out they’re now parking lots.

Hunting public sites is among the most demanding kind of land detecting around. But if you're smarter than the average bear by picking your battles with care, you could eventually become one of those rare detectorists who can master the habit of astounding the naysayers on a regular basis.

© 1999 Scott Buckner