Need Better Results? Put Your Detector Away

Fall's in full swing for those of us Up North. The mosquitos are dead and gone and the year has at least one good Indian Summer weekend left in which to get in some last-minute detecting. Or at least that’s what you’re thinking while scooping handfuls of soggy leaves out of the roof gutters or getting dragged by the wife to still another Oktoberfest-slash-outdoor craft show. Then, faster than you can say Jack Sprat, you’re building snowmen on the front lawn.

If it’s getting too cold, rainy and miserable (and dark way too early) to put in a good day’s detecting where you live, now is a good time to start looking for new sites to hunt come spring. It’s a good time to do this because it’s easier to keep our eyes open for new sites and possibly find new potential in old sites because we don't have a detector in our hands. How often do we find a site and, with visions of old stuff jumping out of the ground dancing in our heads, just start swinging away without first taking a long, hard look at the place. A lot of us assume that just because a site is old, there has to be some old, valuable stuff to be found. And when we walk away hours later with a pocketful of clad, we wonder why. (Does our detector suck? Do we suck at detecting? Does God really hate us?)

The reason why is this: Stick a detector in our hand and point us at any old site and we become as blind as drunken sailors at last call at the ugly bimbo bar. Once you take away that detector, we start thinking and seeing the things we need about the potential in the sites we encounter.

If you want to spend all your time finding nothing but clads and junk jewelry, any park or kiddie playground will do. But nobody spends a few hundred dollars on a really good detector to just find dimes and pennies and tin rings all the live-long day. Quite simply, we want to find the good stuff and lots of it -- and the good stuff is the old stuff that someone would be willing to buy for some green stuff if we wanted to sell it. If you’re someone who has only a few hours a week to detect, you need to spend your time on the most productive, highest-potential sites. In other words, you have to be highly selective when it comes to deciding where to hunt.

For example, running across an old school built at the turn of the century might seem like the stuff of dreams, but will it really be a site worth spending your only three to five hours detecting time on this week? There’s a front lawn all right, but what about all that new-looking landscaping and asphalt surrounding the rest of the building? And how about that big addition tacked onto the back of the building a few decades ago? You might pluck a stray Barber dime or a wheatie to go along with those 126 stinkin' Lincolns from the front lawn, but the bulk of the valuables will have been buried under all that asphalt or carried off with the old dirt removed for the new landscaping.

I spent (or shall I say wasted) the best part of this past hunting season on places like this because I let my enthusiasm do my thinking for me. I spent months digging up tons of clads, some low-value older coins and more relic-type stuff (skeleton keys, lock parts, old hinges, bullet casings, doors of old potbellied stoves) than you can shake a stick at. At first, I thought it was pretty nifty to dig this stuff up. My non-detecting wife Karen, who has a far more objective outlook on this hobby than I sometimes do, really put it into perspective with these wise words: "Yeah, but it’s still junk." Once, I spent an entire sweaty afternoon tromping around a forest preserve with a fellow detectorist and came home with nothing of real value to show for it other than a single, worn 1910 Barber dime. I thought it was an exceptional find. Karen simply rolled her eyes and asked, "You spent five hours out there for that?"

Indeed. Some might argue that the thrill of finding a Barber dime, a wheatie or a silver Washington anywhere is worth the hours spent among the trash to find (or stumble across) it because, well, this is a funny hobby and you never know what you’ll find where. I’ve come to disagree with this thought. In fact, I’ve come to believe it’s nothing but a way to rationalize your way out of not doing research or not reading the signs that point to high- and low-percentage sites in the first place. Why spend your precious detecting time on sites that might cough up one Barber or one Walking Liberty half when you can spend your time instead on sites that will cough up five or ten of them -- and maybe a even token or two for good measure? If the thrill of the hunt was all there was to this hobby, Mel Fisher would be out hunting sunken tugboats. By the same token, if Mel Fisher never did any research either, he’d think a sunken tugboat would be one helluva bonanza after days of aimlessly dragging a magnetometer behind the boat, too.

The key to productive metal detecting is to looking objectively at a site and seeing reasons to, or not to, consider it a high-return site. Like someone who has only one afternoon a week to fish, you have to decide whether you want to use those few hours going for runt bluegills or whopper bass. Highly successful detectorists -- the ones who consistently find the high-value coins and relics and caches of coins -- start each year with a solid list of a high-percentage sites they’ve developed through months of research and physical surveys during the off-season.

Nothing drives home this point more than a post which appeared recently in a Web forum from someone named Jim in New Jersey. I'm leaving it verbatim here because, well, I don’t feel like covering for people who haven’t learned how to write a properly-constructed and punctuated English sentence:

"I'm getting in to a rut with places to detect, researched every possible site,most were developed over,did the school and parks and playground thing,all of the surounding towns by me have laws on their books about detecting. The last two years I've been pulling silver but now all I get is clads, its so beaten by me that usually its only pennies now. I know that no sites ever "hunted" out but you get to the point where its not worth going to no more. I'm even thinking it would be great to move soon, but I've been hitting about 20 or so sites for 2 years now and the pickins' are getting slim!! The main problem with my area is OVER DEVELOPMENT, every site with any history to it has now been turned into townhouses and mini malls. Any ideas on this, or am I just getting burnt out detecting so much? Do you guys hang up your detectors once in a while when it starts getting a little ho-hum??"

"I've researched every site" in my neighborhood? Not a chance, Mack. Unless you're a member of your neighborhood historical society (or hang around it enough to practically be a member), you haven't begun to uncover or discover every potential site that exists. "Potential site" doesn’t just include the things standing in front of us. It includes the things that have been gone for generations, or replaced by something new (and easy to dismiss for not being old enough) that is standing right in front of us. In this hobby more than any other, if it quacks like a duck, it’s going to turn out to be a horse. Unless you take the time to look, how do you know that row of houses built during the 1960s or 1970s on the outskirts of town weren’t built on land where a row of houses built in 1870 stood until they were torn down in 1920 because they were dilapidated, and the land stood vacant for 50 years because it was tied up in court?

Libraries stock only a very small percentage of a town’s vast history, and you won't find the really good information there. Nay, the seemingly bottomless well of in-depth stuff (and more leads than you’d know what to do with) lies within that band of neighbors who serve as custodians of the local past. Joining your neighborhood historical society (or at least hanging around long enough so they get to know who you are) gives you a unique position because you get an inside track on personal collections not available at the library and personal contacts and introductions to friends and acquaintances outside the group -- people who, with the proper introduction, will let you hunt their yards.

People who have written articles on detecting often recommend seeking out the most knowledgeable person on local history and pick his brain. This is sound advice, but it’s only a start because there isn’t one single person who knows local history inside and out. In fact there’s usually a baker’s dozen of 'em because there are just too many people and too many small stories and recollections for one person to be the be-all end-all of local history. The only place where you’d be able to take a common revolver and shoot dead everyone worth calling a town historian is a Wednesday night meeting of the town historical society.

The only drawback, if you can call it that, to joining the town historical society is these groups tend to be overloaded with lots of incredibly old people who take their history seriously, so you’d better have a genuine interest in preserving local history, too. You just can’t join with the sole purpose of sucking up all that knowledge for free. It’s been their history a lot longer than it’s been yours and these people starved barefoot with 12 kids through The Great Depression by gum, so you’d better have something to contribute in some way. Obviously, you could volunteer your detecting skill for the group’s use. This is a plus, but it won’t carry you on its own. You need something useful to contribute to the entire group over the long haul, such as using your computer’s desktop publishing and scanning software to crank out newsletters or transcribe and publish 30 years worth of oral histories nobody’s had time to get around to yet. If you have no technical skills, don’t worry: sweat equity goes a very long way. There isn’t a community group alive that doesn’t have room for yet another designated drone to set up tables and chairs at meetings or serve up gallons of coffee in little Styrofoam cups at functions at the village square.

Like anything, belonging to a historical society has its price, but the benefits can certainly be incredible. In this case, the benefit is you’re now a friend to the whole class, and friends only share the really juicy stuff with friends, not jamokes off the street. They also let friends hunt their yards while the jamokes go begging.

If you’re not much of a joiner, your neighborhood historical society will still be a better source for better information just for the asking than the library will, especially if you live in a small town or a smaller community within a larger city. Historical society members are without exception very helpful people, and they usually have a museum of some sort. This means they’re still apt to bury you with information if you walk in off the street and ask what they’ve got in the way of photos, maps or printed material on the town’s early years.

For the sake of argument, let's assume for a minute that you do know and have researched everything possible about your own area and still have nothing resembling potential high-percentage sites. It’s now time to take one of those things our grandparents used to call "a drive in the country" to look for possibilities well outside your area. Get the kids to a sitter for the weekend, pack up the wife or girlfriend in the car and head out to the country; the more rural the better. Open a road map and find those two-lane roads leading to those one-horse farm towns two or three hours away. Drop in on local libraries and museums, even if the only museum is dedicated to, say, farming implements; the curator can point you toward the keepers of the general history. Look for lakes and swimming holes, old schools with no new landscaping or recent additions that have playgrounds of grass or dirt instead of asphalt, old stone house foundations (not poured concrete or cinderblock) with only the fireplace chimney still standing; abandoned homesteads. Do this during the spring and summer and you might even find a sidewalk rehab project happening.

But why just pass through these little towns, especially if they’re rich in pre-1900s history? We've become a nation of people just passing through. Or given our interstate system, a nation of people just passing around. Find one of these towns, book a room at the local hotel and you've got the beginnings of a great cold-weather weekend, especially if you’re married and haven’t been anywhere quaint-yet-non-touristy in awhile. Take a walk around town. Visit the shops. Eat in a real diner (sit at the station of the waitress who looks like she’s been there since the Coolidge administration). Get a haircut at a real barber shop. Have a few boilermakers and talk up the old timers in the bar of the VFW post (you don’t need to be a vet to get in, by the way). Stop at the library and get a feel for their history – since you’ve never been there, you’ll find history even when the locals on the street swear there is none.

When the weather gets cold or you’ve run out of high-potential possibilities, it’s time to get out and about. Stretch your brain and your legs and you’ll stretch your horizons -- and successes -- as a detectorist. Stuff isn't going to just leap out at you and kick you in the shins. You have to spend more time to search out the smaller clues -- and smaller roads less traveled -- to find the bigger kahuna hiding in the bluegill pond.

© 1998 Scott Buckner