Hi all and Happy Holidays. After some online research and a visit to a regional museum (about a 40 min. drive) I met some wonderful people and got access to an old hand drawn map showing all the first/early settlements in town and the original lotting plans from the 1770s. What a gold mine. After some cross referencing my first target was an old tavern/inn site that was in use from about 1790 to 1828. Finds came out of the ground slowly given the tall grass and thick clay soil common in this area which masks deeper signals, but they were steady enough to keep me coming back several times. The other difficult thing with this site is it's directly next to a modern and heavily traveled US highway next to an intersection, so the car and truck noise made it quite difficult to hear my pinpointer when I removed my headphones - sort of annoying. But I could ignore it seeing what came out of the ground from this site. Topping the list are a Phillip VI 1739 Pillar 2 Reales, a Ferdinand VII 1813 1/2 Reale, and 3 LCS (1803, 1809 and 1834). The corroded 1915 Barber Dime was clearly an unrelated and much later drop (the tavern was torn down in the 1830s). Relics were also quite numerous with about 25 buttons, a barrel tap key, small escutcheons, and some buckles and lead. I may return in the spring for a final cleanup as finds are getting quite thin now, but since I have pictures of the old map and have saved those to my PC, I'll spend the next few months reading, cross referencing, and narrowing down a few more early homesteads/cabin sites in this area. I've already found two others that I'll post about in a few weeks, and I'm sure there will be several others that I can pursue come spring 2022. Thanks for looking.
John
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