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Any advice on hunting an old property?

Dmar

Junior Member
Joined
Mar 13, 2018
Messages
30
My grandparents house has a massive yard, and it was built over 200 years ago. The dining room apparently used to be a store, and there used to be a road running through the back field (absolutely no trace of it now, but I can confirm from looking at maps from the mid/late 1800s) also has a huge tree, clothes line, well... and a dirt cellar that is pretty large. The problem is that the detector is going off constantly, and a lot of the time it’s just like the smallest piece of crumpled up metal. Any general advice for searching a property like this? I’m not sure when it’s worth digging or not.
 
Hit the trees that would of been shade areas in the past. People would go into the store and come out and hang out under the trees on the hotter summer days and talk. Kids would play under the trees.

You really want to hit that clothes line area. Is it in the same area as when the house was first built? If not try to see where the old clothes line area was.
If there was an old road then look where people parked wagons/cars to go into the store.

Problem with old houses is they may have had a tin roof in the past and you can have a lot of chatter around the house area. If it is larger pieces of metal then you will probably want to use a smaller coil to search the area. If it gets to much for you after a while then just cherry pick the area. Keep hitting the area over time and you should be able to work your way through it.

Good luck.

Ray
 
D, the high foot traffic areas will likely be where most items got lost.

The truth is, anything can be anywhere though.

I'd opt for using a smaller coil around the immediate house foundation. You'll need to discriminate between all of the junk and building materials.

Go low and slow with a larger coil in the large open areas.

If you are one of the first detectorists out there, you're bound to get some fun stuff!

Keep us posted!

Sounds like fun.
 
Since it's your grandparents house I assume you are close by and have free run of it anytime you like. If that's the case, I agree with the locations others have listed but start with your disc jacked up high and sensitivty low and cherry pick it. If you start find concentrations of goodies then run up the power, drop the disc and hit that area hard to clean out the junk and hopefully get it out of the way in case it's masking other goodies. Otherwise just take your time and hit it whenever you can, since it's a family lot no need to beat it to death in a day, month or the next 5 years if you don't want to.
 
Cover the area in layers, first with high discrimination, looking for silver... plot your finds, identify the best spots, and then gradually cover it again on lower discrimination, focusing first on the most promising spots, then the whole area more thoroughly as time permits.
 
OP- You're going to have to dig pretty much everything if you want to make good finds. No detector is "spot-on" 100% of the time, and I've (and many others here as well) made good finds when the detector was saying otherwise.

Ever watch a 30 minute fishing show where do is catch fish! Well, it took hours of filming (not catching fish) to get 30 minutes of show quality material.

Same applied to detecting. If anyone is under the impression they're going to dig little trash, and make a large percentage of great finds, is sadly mistaken. Does it happen? Sure, but it's not the norm.
 
old sites

I can be reasonable sure that if you grid a certain section that youd presume was the front of the store or near it and dig that. maybe a 50x 50 square and see what you get. I think you got the idea where I was going.:?::twister:
 
Best advice I can give you is to get a Tesoro Golden uMax and use it. It's pure magic in trashy areas. After that, hunt the whole site top to bottom.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A5010 using Tapatalk
 
What brand detector are you using?



Just saw your other thread about the bounty hunter. Don't know much about them but if they offer a smaller coil I would try that. My at pro with the 5x8
does really well in iron.
 
Any general advice for searching a property like this? I’m not sure when it’s worth digging or not.


First off, congrats on having what seems to be a great place to hunt. Second, be patient. If the detector or settings you are using are creating a constant beep fest you need to adjust settings to get into a useable range. If that doesn’t do it you may need a detector or coil that can handle the trash. Overall, don’t give up and have fun!
 
Some really good advice in here. I did about 6 hours yesterday. Worked around a couple trees and around the well. Pretty crazy though, I literally cannot go 2 feet without there being metal of some kind in the ground. And in a lot of spots it’s like every inch has metal in it. Anyone know how I can find out what the property looked like in the 1800’s? I know google earth has the historical setting, but that only goes back to like 1995 in my area.

Finds so far:

5cent token apparently made between 1890-1940 (if I remember correctly)
Super old safety scissors
Old baby spoon
Something which believe is a cuff link
Lots of pennies. Mostly post 1960, but a few before.
But 50% of what I found, I haven’t cleaned at all and have not identified yet.

The issue with detecting my cellar is that there are these rocks that covered most of the floor, which sound almost identical to silver, and make it impossible to detect anything because they over ride anything potentially hurried. The discriminator is all the way up
 
If it's a historic site like that, chances are it's already been hunted more than once. Usually the high tones are gone, and the lower conductors are left. They're still goodies. I always concentrate on the front yard, that's where most of the activity was. I commonly dig Indian cents near the road, folks and kids would sit and watch the travelers pass on by.
 
If it's a historic site like that, chances are it's already been hunted more than once. Usually the high tones are gone, and the lower conductors are left. They're still goodies. I always concentrate on the front yard, that's where most of the activity was. I commonly dig Indian cents near the road, folks and kids would sit and watch the travelers pass on by.

There were people living in it steadily up until about a year ago though. And it’s right next to a busy road. Hopefully no one had the balls to hunt private property
Right next to a busy highway in broad day light.. hopefully lol
 
Take your time

Go low and slow don’t rush through it hit along side walks and under big 🌲 dig every signal and have fun!
 
I feel your pain man. I'm also new to this hobby, and just got permission to go around a 1921 home. The owner has used this place as his personal trash dump. I'm just taking my time, and cleaning the yards for him at the moment, and hoping the trash turns into flash. I did manage to dig a trash signal last night, and actually pulled out a pretty cool turkey shaped old old wind chime. It's not worth anything other than lifting my spirits.
 
What type of metal are you mostly seeing, iron or something else? If it is iron and if it's on the surface or just under the surface run a magnet over the area. You can get one of those magnets on a pole that you drag around and are used to clean up construction sites. Lowes and Home Depot have them here in the states. You would be surprised how well these work. It will not get the deep stuff but it may help.

Ray
 
Not giving up any time soon. I plan on going over the entire property at least a couple times. I don't even care if I find anything of value, honestly.. Sure it would be nice, but it's more about the story :D

Gonna be posting my finds in over in the finds area if anyone is interested.

Also i'm still open to more advice btw, can never hurt :grin:
 
I am new to the game, but I hunt old homes sites, and the bulk of my coins have come from the front of the house between the door and where you would park a car or wagon. These are trashy sites. Once I figured out the tones of my detector, and went low and slow like others have said, I found I was able to coax out coins among the junk. But, also dug a lot of junk :) Learning my detector has helped more than anything.
 
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