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Treasure hunters
Ron Ethridge (left) of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and Barry Swope of Daphne, Alabama, know the next high-pitched whine of a metal detector could indicate a fascinating find concealed in the soil below.
Photo by Andrew Haworth
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Zeroing in
The metal detector whines, the hole is dug, and then Greg Hornsby of Jacksonville, Florida, gets to search for potential treasure.
Photo by Andrew Haworth
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Lucky find
During a three-day treasure hunt near Chappells, Patrick Stewart recovered what is believed to be a pewter George Washington inaugural pin—a rare and valuable find from the 18th century. “We didn’t know at the moment what it was,” Stewart says of the discovery, shown in this video shot by his hunting partner, Josh Tyree.
Far from the crowds of modern civilization, and deep in the foggy woods outside of Chappells, Barry Swope is sweeping his metal detector close to the ground and listening for the high-pitched tone that might mean treasure.
A half-dozen of his fellow South Carolina Dirt Diggers club members, each with their own metal detectors and shovels, have moved farther ahead. By poring over old maps and by scouring the internet, they’ve researched the land, and they believe they are close to the site of a Colonial gristmill. A Colonial gristmill would mean Colonial people. Colonial people would mean Colonial relics. And Colonial relics are exactly what have brought them here on this three-day weekend hunt in January.
Swope, though, has stopped while crossing a shallow creek. His metal detector is picking up something in the pebbly ground beneath the waters.
“I’m doing something you’re really not supposed to do, which is hunt iron,” he says. “Iron is everywhere. You can lose your mind with it. The machine has the ability to ignore small nails, little pieces of iron. But a place like this? Well, a Confederate button, it’s made of iron. You ignore it, and you won’t find it.”
He uses the handle of his shovel to steady himself as he kneels down into the creek. The shovel makes a crunching sound as he digs out a circle around the target, and he pries out a handful of earth, a big wedge known as a plug. Then he reaches for a belt holster and his pin-pointer—a smaller, wand-shaped metal detector that can give a more precise reading—and he holds it up to the plug. It doesn’t beep.
“No, it’s deeper. That’s a good sign,” he says, because deeper means older, and because for “metalheads,” as for archaeologists, history isn’t a timeline but a layering of earth on top of earth. It’s all about digging to get down to it.
He keeps digging and scanning until the pin-pointer emits a high-pitched tone. Swope reaches one gloved hand into the dirt and pulls out something small but faintly shiny. For a moment, he thinks it might be what most of the detectorists are after this weekend—a button or a coin. Yesterday, one member dug up a cast-iron Confederate button with the letter “I” on it for Infantry.
But then, he holds it up to his eye like a jeweler and gives a half smile as he shakes his head.
“Mr. Shotgun Shell,” he says, bracing himself up with the shovel, his jeans now muddy and wet at the knees.
Nevertheless, he estimates the shell is 100 years old, and he puts it in a container so he won’t find it again. It’s time now, he says, to catch up with the others and see if they’ve found the gristmill.
First, though, he must replace the plug—an essential part of the metal-detecting community’s leave-no-trace ethic. He puts the dirt back in the hole and presses it down with his boots. “Now, no one will know we were ever even here.”
Fertile ground
In many ways, South Carolina is home to some of the most fertile relic-hunting ground in the country.
“The reason everyone loves digging in South Carolina is the vast array of relics dug here,” says Kandi Cochran-Ready, president of South Carolina Dirt Diggers club. “You have the Revolutionary War and an abundance of Civil War artifacts. With the Civil War starting in Charleston, that area is loaded with stuff.”
As club president, Cochran-Ready finds a site for the annual dig and secures permissions from the landowner. For this event, she’s leased the property from a hunt club. Her choice was guided by careful study of the 1825 Atlas of the State of South Carolina by Robert Mills and genealogy pages on the internet. The club believes there was a 1756 township called Scotland once located somewhere within these five square miles. And there’s an 1809 graveyard on the property, with the last person having been buried there in 1851.
It’s the kind of site that makes relic hunters feverish. Indeed, on the Saturday morning of the hunt, they come from all over the country, as the club is open to all who have a respectful interest in the hobby.
One of several metal-detecting clubs in the state, the South Carolina Dirt Diggers club began as a Facebook page among a few friends and has now grown to more than 50 members. The metal-detecting world, after all, is a relatively small and close-knit community, especially in the age of the internet, when people can post their finds online. After news leaked out in the community about some of the club’s discoveries, including Confederate belt buckles, membership spiked.
Most members come to the hobby as amateur history buffs.
“I’ve always been interested in history,” says Chuck Smith of Rock Hill, who, like many relic hunters, has his own YouTube channel, Southern Fried Relics, where he posts videos of his hunts. “I failed about every class in high school except history and science. I loved history, loved knowing what was there before me. To pull something out of the ground that’s been there for 200 years, and I’m the first person to touch it? It can be worth $5 or $500. It’s priceless to me.”
Many of the members have a more personally historical interest. They come to the hobby through genealogy. Patrick Stewart of Scottsboro, Alabama, drove more than five hours to get here because, he says, his roots run deep in South Carolina—back to the revolution, and Stewart grew up spending summers at his grandfather’s house near Due West. Finding relics puts him closer to his familial past.
Swope, who is a psychologist from Daphne, Alabama, offers a different sort of perspective—that metal detecting is like a gambling addiction.
“It’s like slot machines,” he says. “You’ve got intermittent noises—the beeps. Intermittent rewards and the varying value of the reward. Repetitive motion like pulling a slot. It’s like every addicting thing there is—all in one.”
The idea of intermittent rewards is one most relic hunters have no problem talking about. For every good find—a flat button or an old coin—there are thousands of throwaway finds—pop-tops, shotgun shells, barbed wire, scrap metal, chewing-gum wrappers, beer cans.
“The problem is,” says dirt digger Mark Emmons of Paducah, Kentucky, “when people paste their finds on Facebook or something, they’ll paste the good finds, and they don’t put a whole hunk of junk that they’ve also found.”
One small thing any relic hunter likes to find, however, is an old nail. Nails mean construction. Construction likely means homesites. Homesites mean more relics. In this way, metal detecting is like sleuthing as much as it is like gambling. You pick up on small clues to lead you to the greater discovery. Once you make a discovery, well, then the hobby becomes more like historical fiction writing—interpreting what you’ve found and perhaps imagining the story behind it.
Smith, for instance, takes a look at a harmonica reed that’s been dug up and says, laughingly, “Somebody probably jerked it out of his hand and smashed it, because he was tired of hearing it.”
When Swope pulls out an intact, iron wagon wheel from the creek, he says, “This was a serious problem, right there. Their only wagon, losing its tread. You can see the dent. They’ve got a problem, because they’ve got to get food or to the market. It’s a bad day for them.”
Saving history
The question everyone always asks is: “What’s your best find?”
Most relic hunters, when asked this question, kind of roll their eyes or shrug their shoulders. For most hunters, it’s hard to say, and one relic hunter’s favorite find might not be interesting to the next. But most will tell you that the best finds are the ones in which the hard research paid off.
Josh Mangum, an expert hunter who grew up sight-hunting arrowheads in the plowed tobacco fields outside of Charlotte, says his best find was a collection of 18-pound cannon shells from the Revolutionary War that he found near Camden.
“I can date them to the exact week they were lost in 1780,” he says, citing a letter George Washington sent to Gen. Johann de Kalb that mentioned the shells. “I know the troops that were there, and actually, my fifth great-grandfather enlisted there with the artillery regiment.”
This sense of satisfaction is often the reason why relic hunters almost always preserve and collect their finds, and why “selling” is nearly a curse word.
“We don’t do it for the money,” Mangum says. “It’s all about saving history.”
Mangum is passionate about another aspect of relic hunting—that of preserving artifacts—a multi-day process that requires electrolysis for cleaning, baking to remove the moisture and wax varnishing.
“You get into the hobby, and you figure out different methods for cleaning and preserving stuff,” he says. “Especially iron. If you find a cannonball, and you don’t do anything about it, then it’s just going to sit there and disintegrate.”
Digging into the books
While the image of metal detecting normally conjures up the old man on the beach or the straight-faced airport security officer, serious relic hunters spend more time researching sites and securing permissions from landowners than they do in the field.
“We don’t search on any land unless we get permissions to hunt,” says Emmons.
Even after exhaustive research, relic hunters can never count on finding treasure.
“Don’t expect to go out and find a bunch of great stuff to start out with,” says Doug Holder, a veteran relic hunter from Tennessee, whose greatest find in his 30-plus years of detecting is a Confederate belt buckle. “Just go out to enjoy the hobby, and don’t expect to get rich doing it. It’s more about getting out in the woods and nature. If you find something, that’s great. And if you don’t find anything, you’ve had a good day.”
Pay dirt
This hunt, though, would turn out to be about finding something.
As the group continues hunting the gristmill site, Stewart suddenly gets a fantastic signal on his metal detector.
At first, he’s skeptical. All day, he and fellow relic hunter Josh Tyree have been pulling out the metal tops to Beanee Weenee cans in the area—from hunters or loggers, they guess.
Nevertheless, he digs down. The relic hunter’s mantra, after all, is that you never know.
“Looks like a coin in that plug,” says Tyree.
“I think you know what it is,” Stewart says, deflated. “I think it’s a pull tab.”
Stewart breaks open the plug between his two hands, holds the small metal object up and cries, “It’s a button, baby! It is a button!”
Tyree gets out a toothbrush and tells him to go easy on it. It’s a pewter button, with a shank. This is good. This is real good. They high five. They whoop and holler. Stewart puts the button into a container and keeps hunting.
Later in the day, as the sun is starting to descend and the club is gathered together to socialize for their annual raffle, Stewart hands the button over to Swope, who encourages Stewart to clean it off. They pour what they have on it—a little Bud Light Lime.
They see some stars on it and hand the button over to Charles Emmons (twin brother and relic-hunting partner of Mark Emmons), who picks at it gently with his fingernail and begins to make out the letters “ington” on the back. They pour on more Bud Light Lime.
Lo and behold, the name Washington appears.
The crowd gathers. The phones and cameras come out. Emmons says that it might be a George Washington inaugural button, if it has an eagle on it. He picks at the bottom. It has, yes, an eagle on it.
Stewart, who drove from Alabama to reconnect with the state of his ancestors, will no longer be able to shrug off the question, “What’s your best find?” This is the find of a lifetime. And though his wife joked with him about all the money it might be worth, he has no plans to sell it.
“I would love to use it for educational purposes,” he says. “You can’t put a monetary value on it. And, to me, it was just such a special moment in a special place, there in South Carolina.”
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S.C. metal-detecting clubs
Membership in these clubs is open to anyone interested in the hobby. Meetings often include guest speakers, metal-detecting tips and reports by members sharing their finds.
South Carolina Metal Detector & Relic Association
LOCATION: Greer
MEETINGS: First Tuesday of each month, 7 p.m.
INFO: scmetaldetectingclub.com
Palmetto Metal Detecting Club
LOCATION: Little River
MEETINGS: Second Thursday of each month, 6:30 p.m.
INFO: Joe Denton, (330) 338‑2153
Palmetto Relic Hunters Club
LOCATION: Cayce
MEETINGS: Second Tuesday of each month, 7 p.m.
INFO: Rudy Reeves, rreeves@sc.rr.com
South Carolina Dirt Diggers
LOCATION: Statewide membership
MEETINGS: Holds an annual hunt, location to be determined
INFO: Kandi Cochran-Ready, kready74@hotmail.com
South Carolina Treasure & Artifact Association
LOCATION: Greer
MEETINGS: Fourth Monday of each month, 7:15 p.m.
INFO: sctaa.blogspot.com
Carolina Coin and Relic Association
LOCATION: Goose Creek
MEETINGS: Second Thursdays except December, 7 p.m.
INFO: Art Di Filippo, (843) 330‑0016, carolinacoinandrelic.com
Metal Detecting Association of the Carolinas
LOCATION: Matthews, N.C.
MEETINGS: Fourth Tuesday of each month, 7 p.m.
INFO: Charles Jones, coindigger23@yahoo.com
Low Country Metal Detecting Club
LOCATION: Summerville
MEETINGS: First Saturday of each month, 7 p.m.
INFO: Daniel Wilson, lowcountrymdc@gmail.com