1/21/19 Report - Seeing Back Through Time. Another Kind of Find. Increasing Surf and Big Tides Coming.

Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.

Large Porcelain High Tension Insulator.

I've found a good number of insulators during my detecting outings, but most are smaller and glass rather than porcelain.  This is a larger porcelain insulator from a high tension line.  

It has acquired a grey patina.  Underneath is a nice shiny brown.  I think more of that will show if I clean it.

It is marked VICTOR.

I've found some insulators with my metal detector that still had wire attached, but most were found by sight.

Maybe I'll show more of those in the future.  Most of them are nice, but not worth a lot.

Here is what I found on the history of Victor Insulators, Inc.

 The Village of Victor is located in Western New York State, seventeen miles east of Rochester.  The Village of Victor was incorporated in 1879.  At the hub of three railroads it quickly became an industrial center of the region and is the birthplace of the wet process, high voltage porcelain insulator.   

Look around you at every power pole in your area and think Victor Insulators.  Virtually all porcelain insulator companies owe their origins to the inventor, Fred Locke.  He built the Locke Insulator business in Victor in 1898 and today it is known around the world as Victor Insulators, Inc. Porcelain insulators are made of high quality clays, combined with selected minerals, glazed with colored pigments, then fired in a 2,300 degree kiln.  Standard and custom shapes of insulators are still being produced today...

Here is that link.

http://victormug.com/Victor.pdf

And here is a long list of porcelain insulators along with prices.

https://www.insulators.info/porcelain/photos/photos/u465-yel.htm

I haven't found this specific one yet.

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I'm going to meander down memory lane before I get to my main point today.  

I awoke this morning before sunrise with a smile upon my face that lasted at least an hour.  I had a dream, or more accurately, a few dreams, that took me back to a time some sixty or seventy years ago.

It was a different time and place, but one I've definitely not forgotten.

The boys who spent their later teens on the beaches of Normandy or Midway, or at the Battle of the Bulge or liberating concentration camps, or in the Pacific had returned from the war and built houses and started families.

I was the child of one of those boys who tried to make a better life for his family.  I grew up rich, even though we didn't have much money.

It is a green valley in rural Pennsylvania populated by farms dating well back into the 1800s.  Scattered between the old farm houses were a few new small houses built by the veterans with whatever they could scrape up.

In one of my dreams, I revisited that valley where I and my friends grew up in the 1950s.  Some of us went to Viet Nam, and some of us visited the beaches of Fort Lauderdale for Spring Break.  Who said life is fair?

No matter how the historians write about it, it is never the same as being there.

My dream took me back to an event that I've told about before.  My friend and I found a dump filled with bottles.

Just like it once was on the Treasure Coast, at that time we didn't have garbage collection and the farms and families buried or burned their trash.  Below every old farm house was a dump that had accumulated close to a century of bottles and miscellaneous garbage.

Well, we got bottles from one of those dumps and threw them into the creek at the bottom of the valley.  Then we ran downstream along the creek to a rock cliff that stuck out above the creek.  As the bottles floated by, we imagined that they were warships and we tried to sink them with our bee bee guns before they got by.  That is what I relived in my dream.

So how does that have anything to do with treasure hunting or this blog?

Not long ago I actually visited my old stomping grounds up north for an all too-short visit.  Those old dumps are now overgrown.  There was little evidence that they ever existed.  But it was like I could see through time.  I could see the huge oak tree that was no longer there.  I could see the big old black barn that was a part of both my history and my mother's, even though it had been replaced by a characterless aluminum building.  I could see the spring house, that was so nice and cool in the summer, and the dump, both of which had been bull-dozed.   Hidden by a heavy layer of weeds and trees and completely invisible to any new comer, I could clearly see the old baseball field, along with the kids and parents and many events that took place there in times past.

Kids know their neighborhood like no one else - or at least we did.  We knew where arrow heads were found.  We explored every hill, valley, spring, creek, meadow and clump of trees.

My grandparents also took me places and showed me where things happened when they were kids.  My grandmother showed me the part of the stone chimney that remained from the house where she was raised, and where she went to picnic.  And I can remember every inch of it today, even though I haven't been there for years.  

Finally, here is my point.  If you detect the area where you grew up and where your family settled long ago, you have a tremendous advantage.  On the other hand, if you find yourself living in an area that is newer to you, you might want to talk to some of the older citizens who don't mind reminiscing about their childhood in the area.  They can probably see back through time too.

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I've been enjoying the coin collecting magazines I picked up at the Treasure Coast Coin Collectors table at the Vero coin show yesterday.  I'll have more to say about that some other time.

I was thinking of talking about beach search patterns today, but didn't get it done.

I went out to check for the lunar eclipse last night, but was early and didn't see it.

The moon was beautiful anyhow, and we are now having some really big tides.  Too bad the west wind the surf has not increased much yet.

Source: MagicSeaWeed.com.

As you can see, the Treasure Coast surf will be up to three to five feet on Tuesday and Wednesday.  That combined with the big tides should help out some areas.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net

5/10/17 Report - Small Change on the Beach. Mule and Other Error Coins. In the Dumps. Florida Wildfires.

Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.

Mule Quarter
Source: See link below.

I haven't talked about coins much lately.  It seems that you don't find as many coins on the beaches anymore.  People aren't carrying money as much.

Down south there were a lot of places where people needed change when they went to the beach, either to feed the parking meters or to pay park entrance fees.  That meant more change on the beach.  

On the Treasure Coast the beach accesses are mostly free.  And there are few places where there are concession stands.  That means less change on the beach.

I used to detect some places where there was evidently some type of paid parking next to the beach in the old days. All that remained at one such location was an old wooden post and a small section of a packed shell road right next to the beach where I believe people must have paid their parking fees. The road was very close to the water at that point and actually eroded when the water was rough. That was a good place to find lots of old coins when the bank eroded. I once got five mercury dimes in one scoop. There were older coins and some old jewelry there too. It was very good detecting when it eroded.  I suspect that it is still very good detecting when it erodes.

There was one place where I found a lot of Susan Anthony dollars in the shallow surf. I never understood why that would be.

I believe it is still a good idea to take a good look at any coins you might find. There is always the possibility of something interesting popping up. You never know when you might pick up an error coin. I've dug a few over the years.

I've been finding an odd number of wheat pennies. I don't know if people have decided to spend their collections or what.  They are in good condition.

Mule coins are one type of error coin. You can easily miss them. A mule coin is a coin struck with dies that were not intended to be paired. "The most prominent of these would likely be the 14 Sacagawea dollar planchets struck by a Washington quarter dollar obverse die and a Sacagawea dollar reverse die.” The quarter at the top of this post is one example.

Collector Tommy Bolack wrangled his 10th Sacagawea dollar/Statehood quarter mule during an Aug. 6 Stack’s Bowers Galleries auction for a total price of $117,500.

Here is the link for the rest of the article.

http://www.coinworld.com/numismatic/collector-basics/start-your-collection/coin-world-mule-error-coins-collecting-basics-numismatics-87398475.all.html

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Recent construction uncovered an early 1800s dump in Iowa that yielded thousands of artifacts.  This article raises many issues that I could discuss but I won't take the time to do it now.

Old dumps are good places to find old things.  They won't appeal to people that hunt modern jewelry.  You might be able to find old jewelry if you explore enough old dumps, but more often you'll find broken or cheap items.

Old dumps are explored especially by bottle hunters.  They are especially challenging for detectorists because of the prevalence of old cans, iron and other miscellaneous pieces of metal.

I'd love to be able to go dig up the old burn pile areas and dumps where I grew up. Some of them existed long before I came along. As a kid there was one dump in a field below an old farm house where we would get bottles to shoot with our bb guns.  We'd take them up the creek, throw them in, then run down to where there was a high cliff looking out over the creek, and sit there and shoot the bottles as they floated down the creek.

A lot of bottles were tossed in depressions or dips where water run off.  Such places are worth scanning.

You might know that on the Treasure Coast, the lagoon was used as a dump before there was garbage pickup.  As a result tons of bottles and things can be found in the river when conditions are right.

There are also places where you can see the remains of burn piles on the bank of the lagoon.

Here is the link to the article about archaeologists exploring the 1800s dump.

http://globegazette.com/news/iowa/excavation-uncovers-major-iowa-archaeological-site/article_76945ace-935e-513f-b5e3-d0946d7c39b2.html

One of the issues relevant to that article, is how much actual archaeological value items in discarded in a dump might have.  Does the context of those items provide any information?  Like I said, I won't get into all of those kinds of discussions today.

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“Florida is in the middle of its worst wildfire season in years – with no end in sight,” Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Commissioner Adam Putnam said in a May 8 statement."

Of course that means you need to be careful with cigarette butts and campfires, but for the detectorist there is another side to wildfires.  Fires can remove brush and open up new detecting territory that might have been protected by vegetation for a long time.

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This is the last day of the current blog poll.

More small surf coming.  No change in beach conditions.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net