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big permission but is it all worth hunting.

Manimal85

New Member
Joined
Jun 1, 2021
Messages
15
I was able to get the green light on a big piece of property (approximately 700 acres) recently and am planning to start detecting it this weekend. According to the owner, who has lived on the property since the 50's, no one has ever detected any of it. The property has been in his family for many generations. There are 5 old home sights that I know of, but only one still has the house partially standing. There is an old grits mill by a creek and an old saw mill by the same creek further up. Both of the mills are just some boards and stone left where they once were. There is also a old trash dump on the property near one of the old home sights.

So there is a lot of places to start and honestly probably more than I will ever get around to hunting. But, say I do hunt all those areas hard and decide to look for fresh areas. Is it worth going out and hunting the woods around the property? there is a lot of really old hard woods and a bunch of large planted pines in areas that used to be agriculture fields. Would it be a good idea to run through the areas that are not known home sights or anything other than old agriculture quickly to make sure there is not some unknown home sight there? I mainly want to find coins but would not be opposed to civil war relics and there was some civil war activity in this area. How do you go about searching such a large area?
 
I'm in the woods a lot. I start with old trail maps, features that look like trails, and good spots to camp. Once I clean those out I'll randomly bounce around the woods with my GPS logging any good finds. Get a find and spiral out from that. Get enough finds and you can almost predict the next hotspot. Or if you're close by you can invite me and we can run through it in person šŸ˜
 
Mills First

I would hit the grist mill first and hit it hard.
Then the saw mill and hit it hard.
Then the house site with the highest elevation.
Then the other house sites in order of descending elevation.
My theory is more money exchanged, more foot traffic, more horse/buggy/wagon traffic and more people putting hands in and out of pockets at the grist mill.
Same theory with the saw mill. Greater amounts of money were exchanged at the sawmill but those exchanges of money were less frequent than at the grist mill.
The mills will have less junk because the owners kept them cleaner since they were conducting business with the public. For this reason the grist mill will have less junk than the saw mill. The houses will have more pure junk in the ground.
Descending elevation order on the houses because the more money the owners had the higher their house site was for drainage. The sawmill owner's house should be the most productive because he should have made more money than anybody in town. Those are just my theories.
How overgrown are those areas?
This would be a dream come true for most of us.
I would work it every chance I had if I were you.
(Random detecting in the woods would be last for me and even researching the woods would wait until I exhausted those mill areas.)
 
How overgrown are those areas?

The Mill sites are grown over in big oaks now but the trees have shaded out the undergrowth for the most part so the ground is pretty clean. However the roots will be pretty bad I think. Two of the home sites are very overgrown with brush and will be hard to detect so I might have to do some clean up to do any good at those. The other home sites are wide open and will be easy to search. The grits mill location is behind a pond dam and the owner says that the water was run off the pond to power the mill. There isnā€™t much of that mill except a nearly gone set of wooden steps and foundation stones but there is a big waterhole that appears to be deep behind the dam that he says was right behind the mill. The water hole connects to the creek.
 
wonder where they got their water for the house every day? I'd 1st check the front yards of the houses for coins


my 2Ā¢
 
No Karens.

It sounds like one of the best things about this permission is nobody will bother you on 700 acres. Please continue to share this adventure with us as you detect.
 
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