Tell the story of finding it! Inquiring minds want to know. Park? Private home? Age of home? Depth? All in the same giant hole? Was it in a container? Spill the beans man!
Silver Strike – Thanks for asking! Here’s the story!
So, this find is certainly not as exciting as you may think or as I’d like it to be. There’s no treasure map, research, internet sleuthing, or “my daddy’s daddy’s daddy said that…” to go off of. And honestly, a metal detector wasn’t even involved – chalk this find up to a bad phone line.
This stash was found at a homesite in western VA. The property has a pretty good colonial history from all of the military relics and civilian items found there and based on maps and some research, there “should” be CW relics there, but I’ve never dug anything there from that period. (CW relics are my main interest in this hobby.)
Originally, there was a home on the site during the 1800’s, but it burned down in 1890-something, the remnants pushed aside on the hillside (now buried) and the current house was built on the old home’s foundation during the early part of the 1900’s. I don’t know much about any of the previous owners, but it was purchased by a family friend in 2014. This stash was found under the front porch of that house. I never would have thought to detect/look under the porch because he has pretty good acreage and a couple of old homesites on his property that usually give up something interesting.
It all started when my buddy’s landline phone quit working. The phone guy came out and had to crawl under the house to troubleshoot the line. He came back out from under the house and said that there’s coins all over the place down there. Took a look and sure enough, you could see loads of coins, everywhere. In fact, some coins were barely covered in dirt, like they had been dropped between porch boards or just casually tossed under the porch. Only needed a shovel and shaker board to harvest all these coins. Coins were scraped from barely under the surface to about 2 1/2 feet down, all in an area about 3’ x 4’. Didn’t find any mason jars, stoneware, cloth remnants, cans, or other containers that might have held the coins at one time. Dates of the coins go from 1883 IHP to 1950's wheat pennies.
At first, I was thinking maybe it was a Depression era hoard because of the V nickels and IHP’s, but there’s not enough of them to really say that, plus the dates on the pennies (40s and 50s) kind of contradict that idea. Plus, as others have noted, there was no silver at all. Nothing over a nickel was dug out from under the porch. We have absolutely no idea who put it there or why. Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe, just maybe, the silver is somewhere else on the property??
Going through the coins, I haven’t found any key dates (THANKS for the list Coinshark!) yet, but I’m still looking!
Final thought – I’ll pay more attention to porches now. lol