Research and Persistence Finally Pay Off!

In March and April of 1865, some 90,000 Federal troops moved west on Raleigh following the defeat of General Joseph A. Johnston's army at Bentonville.  Their objectives were to capture the North Carolina capital and destroy Johnston's Confederate forces for good.  After Governor Vance's surrender of Raleigh, the Federal Army, with Kilpatrick's cavalry in the vanguard, pursued the fleeing remnants of the once mighty Army of Tennessee.  Ultimately, in the wake of Lee's surrender at Appomattox, Johnston negotiated surrender terms for the approximately 80,000 troops under his command at the Bennett farm near Durham's Station.

After several efforts to pin down one of several specific campsite used by this invading Federal force my friend, Tony Stevenson from Detecting Saxapahaw, and I finally located one.

The area we've focused our efforts on is very inhospitable terrain, overgrown by extremely dense scrub pine and briars.  In some spots, it can take up to 10 minutes just  to travel 30 yards.  This was our third trip to this particular location which, over the course of our recent expeditions, has claimed a boot, an ear cuff from Tony's headphones, his digging tool, and the upper arm cuff on my E-TRAC.  Thankfully, our persistence paid off and, after repeatedly coming home empty handed, scarred, and with slightly depleted blood levels, we finally discovered an area untouched since the days in 1865 when North Carolina was invaded by the largest, most well-equipped army on earth.

On this occasion, as we made our way back into the woods where we had permission to detect, a slow drizzle began to fall.  We spread apart and started hunting along the banks of a river that served as a water source for the troops while encamped in the region.  The density of the trees, briars, and saplings made for difficult detecting but we finally reached a site where Tony had dug some bullets and a large cent on a previous visit.

Armed with the knowledge that there had been troops in this exact location and determined not to go home empty-handed again, we started to search in earnest.  Against the backdrop of rain pattering on leaves, the only other sound was threshold tone from our metal detectors and the soft bubbling of the nearby stream.  And within a few minutes, at the base of a large American Beech, I got a good signal and proceeded to dig.  There were so many roots, branches, and saplings in my way that it took probably 3 minutes to recover the target which, sure enough, turned out to be a .58 caliber three ringer.

At last!  After researching this site for so long, I finally held in my hand proof positive that we were in the right spot.  I snapped the above photo and looked around to savor the moment and study the terrain.  Looking out over the damp forest with a river wending its way a short distance below, I imagined the scene as it would have been when the bullet I'd just recovered was dropped.  The experience was overpowering and unlike any other relic hunt I'd enjoyed to date.   Here was a spot that I had found based on my own research and here, the terrain was untouched by humanity for 150 years.  It was easy to imagine the troops arrayed on this wooded slope on a warm, Carolina afternoon.  Stacking rifles and laying their haversacks, ammo cases, and uniforms on the river bank, they probably bathed in its waters—a respite from the heat and welcome relief from weeks of dusty marches—bullets fell among the leaves and were lost to the world of man until this precise moment.


I called out to Tony and let him know of my find.  He came over to scrutinize it and got the "I'm going to find something now" look in his eye.  He went back to where he'd been detecting and I covered up the hole I just dug, picked up my gear, and resumed the search.  And BANG.  Another signal, 3 feet away.  This one turned out to be a Williams cleaner bullet with intact base.

And now Tony calls out that he's found a Williams cleaner himself, about 20 yards away.  And five minutes later, I dig another cleaner bullet.  Then, in rapid succession and all within an area of 50 square feet, I dig three more three ringers for a total of 6 bullets.  Tony dug the same number.  So within about 45 minutes, we recovered a dozen bullets in this one, concentrated spot.


Until this hunt, I'd never recovered so many bullets in such a small area.  And I'd never recovered them in situ as these were.  No plow had scattered them, they lay as they fell.  Another interesting aspect of this hunt was that Tony and I had been in this exact spot before!  He had found a few bullets and a large cent, but we'd written it off as an isolated drop.  We were mistaken and it's worth noting how important it is to not get sloppy in your detecting methods, there's no telling what you'll miss.


By the time we'd recovered a dozen bullets, it was time for us to go home.  We still had to traverse the difficult terrain on the way back to the car.  So we reluctantly turned off our machines and commenced the hike back toward civilization and the 21st century.  But rest assured we will have more to report on this site in the near future.

Colt Revolver Trigger Guard

Yesterday my detecting buddy Tony Stevenson from Detecting Saxapahaw and I visited one of the areas I'd been researching to see if we could find some Civil War relics.  We ended up hunting in a spot a mile or two down the road from where we'd intended to hunt at the location of what had been an old homestead at the time of the Civil War.

One of the things that made this a particularly exciting area to search was the abundance of old glass and ceramic shards that littered the area.  It was difficult to take a step without seeing broken shards or pieces of brick.

In the midst of this debitage, I got a great audio signal on my E-TRAC.  Due to the amount of iron in the vicinity, I was hunting in two-tone ferrous mode and swinging really slowly.  The high tone really stood out and was solid and repeatable from all directions.

A few yards away, Tony was sitting on the ground eating his lunch.  I said, "Uh oh, I've got a good signal here."  He got up, chewing, and watched me dig a plug.  I turned it over and out popped this:

 It's the solid brass trigger guard assembly of a Colt percussion revolver.

There are many varieties of Colt pistols with the two main variants being the Colt 1851 Navy Revolver in .36 caliber and the Colt Army Model 1860 in .44.  Both "belt pistols" used the same frame and both were single action, black powder, cap and ball pistols.

The serial number on the trigger guard I found is readable on the leading edge of the plate behind the mounting screw as in the one pictured above.

It's probably not apparent from the photo, but the serial number is 85997.  If it's from a model 1851 Navy Revolver, that would put it's manufacture in 1858.  If the trigger guard is from an 1860 Army Revolver, it's year of manufacture is 1863.  If I'm able to definitively identify the model, I'll post an update.  Either way, it's likely that this pistol saw action in the Civil War.

One rather odd thing I noticed when researching this piece was that another dug trigger guard posted on Corinth Civil War Relics has almost the exact same deformation.  Here's the guard as posted on that site ...

I'm wondering if the similarity is evidence of intentional destruction to render the weapon inoperable?  If anyone has any information about this, please drop me a line or comment on the blog.

In addition to the trigger plate, Tony and I found a few other interesting relics.  Be sure to check out Detecting Saxapahaw blog for his especially nice war relic.

This apparently very old bottle was a surface find.  The particular house we were hunting was there at least as far back as 1815 and probably for longer than that.  Judging by the color, form, and extreme thickness of this bottle mouth, I'm guessing it's early 19th or late 18th century.

One more neat find at this site was an old Mercury dime.  The date is 1918.  It's not often you hunt a location that was occupied for a century!

1918 Mercury Dime

I'd like to thank the gracious landowner for allowing us to hunt on their historic property.  This one deserves another visit soon so stay tuned.  For an overview of the design and history of these two great cap and ball revolvers, I highly recommend this excellent video by Mike Beliveau.

A scout carrying his "Colt Revolving Belt Pistol" in Brandy Station, VA.

Site Survey Saved by Silver

As I mentioned elsewhere on the blog, I've been spending a lot of time lately doing research on some local Civil War camp sites.  Last week, having identified a likely prospect on the map, I visited it in person to check it out.  My friend Tony Stevenson of Detecting Saxapahaw came along for the adventure.

As it turned out, this was a day from the twilight zone.  We got lost en route, several landowners weren't answering the door, and I'm pretty sure we found the headquarters of a cult.  To top things off, when we were completely famished and decaffeinated, we couldn't locate so much as a vending machine.  When we finally found an old country store and approached the register with arm-fulls of gatorade, pop-tarts, etc., the elderly proprietor informed us that she only accepted cash of which we had exactly none.

In any case, after walking several miles and detecting for very little of that time, we ultimately came up empty-handed at this particular location.  I haven't given up on the site by any means and will update readers on progress down the road.  But after a few hours of hiking and nothing but threshold tone, Tony and I decided to relocate the hunt to one of his sites where he'd previously made some good finds including a US belt plate.

My first find at this new locale for me was this nice flat button ...

I'm unable to discern what the writing says although Tony, with clearly superior detail vision than I possess, offered a translation in the field.  I'll have to follow up with him and will update the blog once I have it.

[UPDATE:  Tony just emailed me this awesome picture that shows what the button says.  Thanks Tony!]

The second find was really a fun one.  I've been hunting primarily with my GPX 4800 lately.  And, as fantastic a machine as it is for finding deep relics, it's really a binary detector in that it can only tell you whether a target is iron or whether it's not.  I should note that that's a limitation of all pulse induction machines and that the GPX has the absolute best iron discrimination available.  But on this particular day, I was using my other Minelab detector, the E-TRAC, which is a VLF machine and which has the ability to provide much more information about the target than any PI machine currently available.

In fact, the E-TRAC provides more details on the nature of a target than any other VLF machine on the market, too.  Rather than utilizing a single integer value to characterize alloys, E-TRAC provides two values—a ferrous number and a conductive number that combined are what Minelab calls Smartfind.™

Without going into too much detail, the FE value is a scale from 1 to 35 and the CO value ranges from 0-50.  The beauty of this system is that, while several targets can possess identical values on one scale, the chances of their sharing both CO and FE values are low.  For example, a square nail and a silver quarter both sound good and might even have the same VDI number (to use White's method of classifying targets).  On an E-TRAC they will share the same CO value, but the FE value will be different, allowing the detectorist to tell the difference between valuable and trash targets.

E-TRAC Screen showing FE and CO values for a target.

That being said, any system of classifying metallic targets is prone to some error given soil conditions, depth, and proximity of adjacent targets.  But shortly after finding the flat button, I got an absolutely rock-solid 12-45 reading.  To any E-TRAC owner, that number means one thing: SILVER DIME.  I dug a large plug, flipped it over, and sure enough, out popped this guy.

Cool, a "Seated Liberty" dime.  Flipping it over, I made out the date of 1891 which you may or may not be able to discern in the regrettably poor quality photo below.

1891 Seated Liberty Obverse

This find was literally the silver lining to an otherwise somewhat exasperating day.  Thanks to Tony for sharing his cool site and for the camaraderie.  I promise we'll locate that camp soon!

Book Review: Relic Hunter by Howard Crouch

Happy New Year everyone. It's been especially silent here at Silent Remnants lately primarily because I've gone into research mode, using the holidays to immerse myself in North Carolina circa 1865 and locate some promising places to detect.

Happily, I've managed to identify some interesting locations on the map and via on-site surveys and I'll update readers on the results of that groundwork soon.

In the meantime, I thought I'd share some thoughts on one of the books Santa brought me and which I've been thoroughly enjoying over the past few days —it's "Relic Hunter: The Field Account of Civil War Sites, Artifacts, and Hunting" by Howard Crouch.

This book was published in 1978 and relays, through conversational anecdotes, the incredible experiences of die hard relic hunters in Northern Virginia hunting in the 1960's and 70's. It's a fascinating read from several perspectives.

First, some of the individuals hunting in the 60's knew men who had actually spoken with Civil War veterans. Some of the campsites the relic hunters explored were mentioned by their grandfathers who retained memories of tales shared by their own grandfathers. In many cases, relic hunters could walk right into a large camp and see the outline of the huts and the crumbling chimneys, dormant since the troops last used them. It's this sense of time that makes "Relic Hunter" such a fantastic read. When we dig an artifact that's 150 years old, it can sometimes seem like an immense span of time. But it's actually only a few human generations that separate our world of iPhones, satellites, and M1A1 Abrams Tanks from the era of horses, steam, and blackpowder.

The main appeal of "Relic Hunter" is, of course, reading what it was like to be the first person to hunt a Civil War camp or even, in some cases, a battlefield, something that, for detectorists today, is unfathomable.

For example, one hunter discovers a section of the Monocacy battlefield in Maryland that was "full of everything—US box plates, hat ornaments, flat buttons, and one really pretty, big, round hat wreath. Shell fragments and pieces of fuse were all over." Other hunters describe a typical day's hunt as yielding 3 plates.

One of my favorite stories from the book concerned efforts to restore a section of the Chancellorsville battlefield in 1932. William K. Howard was riding his horse through an area he'd passed through several times before, "when [he] just happened to look down and see this saber stuck upright in the ground. It was dark and weathered down to a point where it blended right in with the trees."

Howard returned to the site with a crew and it turned out to be the shallow grave of a cavalryman, quickly interred by his fellow soldiers where he fell, the saber he'd wielded in battle had become the headstone of his grave.

The book is full of stories such as this and replete with black and white photos of box plate after incredibly rare box plate and other incredible relics.

The only downside to "Relic Hunter" (and this is a minor quibble) is the recurring theme that relics, like the world of the 1860's, have disappeared. As Crouch puts it, "The days of the easy pickings on battlefields and large winter camps are all but gone ... Good sites are hard to find...and every piece coming out of the woods is gone from the soil forever. In contrast to game hunting, the digging sport exists on a non-recurring resource and consequently must surely end one day in the not too far distant future."  This is all true, but newcomers to the hobby may find Crouch's comments a tad deflating.

Only a few pages of the book are dedicated to telling the reader "how" to find places to look for relics. There is a single chapter (27) that deals with methods and it contains valuable advice.


But the main appeal of this book is to put yourselves in the shoes of relic hunters who were the first to re-enter the world of the Civil War.  If you're looking for some inspiration to do more research or to get out and hunt, this book will certainly provide that in droves.  Highly recommended. 

Detecting Bentonville

Mower's charge at the Battle of Bentonville

A couple of weeks ago, thanks to my good friends Tony and John, I was able to do something I'd dreamed about since moving back to NC — relic hunt at Bentonville.

Bentonville was the last battle of the Civil War in the Old North State, the denouement of Sherman's Carolina's Campaign, and prelude to Johnston's surrender of 80,000 Confederate troops to Sherman at Bennett Place in Durham three and a half weeks later.  It was a battle where an overconfident Sherman committed tactical and strategic mistakes causing him to understate Bentonville's significance in his Memoirs and characterize it as a mere skirmish, devoting only 4 pages to the battle, and leading subsequent historians to also gloss over a ferocious, historic battle fought by approximately 60,000 Union and 20,000 Confederate troops.

Sherman went so far as to downplay Johnston's own account of the battle writing, "After the first attack on Carlin's division, I doubt if the fighting was as desperate as described by him [Johnston]."  This was modus operandi for Sherman.  The Carolinas Campaign undoubtedly catalyzed the end of the War and was a masterful achievement of organization and logistics on Sherman's part.  But throughout his career, Sherman's track record when it came to fighting against organized armies, even those as young as Johnston's at Bentonville, was less stellar than his attacks on citizenry and property.  I'll cover this topic in more detail in a future blog post.

On the day we hunted, the weather was perfect and we all ended up in shirt sleeves.  The land in Bentonville is flat and the soil is extremely sandy.  A shovel dropped blade first into a plowed field will penetrate a good 5" into the soft ground.  Surrounded by stands of cotton under a huge expanse of blue skies, we made our way into a field where, in March 1865, the left wing of the Union army had their main encampment.

The site soon began to yield treasures unseen since those three days of fighting.  The first good signal I got on my e-Trac detector was a Williams Cleaner bullet.  This was followed by another that retained its zinc washer.

The zinc washer at the base of a Williams Cleaner was designed to expand upon firing and it literally scraped the bore clean of black powder build up.  Black powder fouling was a constant issue for combatants throughout the War.  Cleaner bullets were issued to Union troops in the ratio of one cleaner to every 15 or so normal bullets.   These particular bullets appear to be Williams Cleaner-pistol carbine Type III variants with a .575 diameter.

My next find was a brass cap box finial.

Finials such as this one were mounted on the base of a leather case that each soldier wore and which contained his supply of percussion caps.   The finial served as part of the closing mechanism of the box flap, designed to protect the caps from water damage.  Here's a photo from a non-dug box showing how it would have appeared to the soldier who used it.

My best find of the day, yet another first for me, was a brass artillery fuse.

This particular fuse was from a 3" Hotchkiss shell.  Union artillery had retreated to a position near where it was found on day 3 of the battle.  It's fairly remarkable that, since March 21 1865, no one had come across this rather large relic especially given the benign soil conditions of Bentonville.  But it's especially gratifying to be able to discover and preserve a relic with such a specific and certain provenance as this.

Cross-section of a Hotchkiss shell showing fuse

Given the condition of this fuse, it's difficult to say whether it came from an exploded shell or whether it was dropped and subsequently damaged.  The 3" Hotchkiss was the most common Union projectile, but it was a widespread practice during the War for Confederate troops to recover and use unexpended rounds from the field.

Here's the day's finds.  Not too bad considering the field had been extensively hunted for years.

Be sure to check out my friend Tony's finds from the same trip at his excellent blog, Detecting Saxapahaw.

Special thanks to the gracious landowner who made it possible for us to discover, preserve, and share these relics—all that remain of those 3 tempestuous days in March when so many Americans died for their cause.

For excellent primary source accounts of the Battle of Bentonville, see War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies Vol. 47, Parts 1 & 2.

For a recent analysis, I highly recommend Mark L. Bradley's, "Last Stand in the Carolinas:  The Battle of Bentonville."

DIV XIX Finds

After the DIV XIX article I got a few comments from folks wanting to see all of my DIV finds including the Eagle breastplate after it had been cleaned.  So here's the result of 3 days relic hunting in Culpeper (click on images to open zoomed view in a new window).

DIV XIX Relics

Here's a closeup of one of my favorite finds and another "first" for me —the carved bullet. It's amazing to think of a soldier playing chess with this in camp below Hansbrough ridge during the winter of 1863.

And finally, here's a photo of the Eagle Breastplate after cleaning.

Diggin' In Virgina XIX

Diggin' in Virginia XIX was my third opportunity to attend one of John and Rose Kendrick's amazing DIV events.  If you're unfamiliar with DIV and want to learn more about it, visit the DIV home on mytreasurespot.com.

The first DIV I was fortunate enough to attend was held at Cole's Hill in Culpeper, VA.  Cole's Hill was the site of a large Union Army encampment during the winter of 1863.  Many of the troops stationed there would go on to fight Lee's army at Gettysburg.  But before that harrowing experience, they had to endure the challenges of surviving Northern Virginia winter.

Cole's Hill in 1863 (note the tents and huts literally covering the hill)

They accomplished this by constructing huts and tents on the defensible high ground of Cole's Hill.   Imagine being able to walk that same hill today.  Now imagine being able to metal detect it and you'll begin to understand why DIV is truly an incredible experience.

This year at DIV XIX we returned once more to Cole's Hill but extensive acreage to the south including Hansbrough Ridge was added to the hunt area along with several fields that had never been open to organized detecting with pulse induction machines.

The soil in Culpeper is notorious among metal detectorists as being "hot."  It's not much of an exaggeration to say that the dirt is literally iron and it presents a real challenge to VLF metal detectors, most of which can't differentiate metallic targets from the soil itself.  As a result of these conditions, and in spite of decades of relic hunting, there remain amazing relics that await discovery today by those with modern metal detectors.

Typical Culpeper red dirt. Northern tip of Hansbrough Ridge in background.

This was the first DIV where I was able to use my new Minelab GPX 4800.  In fact, I had less than 12 hours total on the machine prior to DIV so I was a tad concerned about how I'd fare.  Even so, I was excited to have a machine that I knew was capable of significant depth even in mineralized soil and which also had an iron discriminate feature, something that my previous PI machine (a White's TDI Pro) did not.

Shortly after starting to hunt on the first day, I got what I call the "dig me now!" signal.  It's an unmistakable and very loud tone that starts out low, raises to a peak as you move the coil over the target, and then drops back down to a lower pitch.  There was no signal blanking meaning that the target wasn't iron.  So I proceeded to dig.  And dig.  And dig.  After several shovel fulls of Virginia's "sacred soil," I finally had the target out of the hole.  It turned out to be a fairly battered Eagle uniform button.  Here's the hole it came out of and where it had lain for the past 150 years.

Not a bad start and my first button find with the GPX.  Not long afterwards, a gentleman approached me.  It turned out to be Kevin Hoagland, Minelab's Director of Education.  He asked how I was doing and if there were any questions I had about my GPX.  I was really impressed that Minelab had an actual representative at DIV and Kevin is a great ambassador on behalf of the company and their products.  The evening before, he gave a GPX seminar to any DIV attendee who wanted to attend.  There were about 50 folks in the audience and I'm fairly certain that every one of them wanted the same thing:  The golden settings for their GPX!

That's not what they got at the seminar.  And I think it speaks highly of Kevin Hoagland and Minelab that they didn't just hand out photocopies of recommended soil timings for the Culpeper area.  That would have been easy.  Instead, for about an hour and a half, Kevin gave a Powerpoint presentation that explained soil timings and taught how to find the ideal settings for any area you might be hunting.  Even though I'd read the GPX owner's manual several times and scoured forums for any tidbit of helpful information I could find, I learned several key things in Kevin's talk.  They deserve their own separate blog post.

Minelab's Kevin Hoagland explains soil timings and the GPX

And now, here was Kevin walking around DIV, finding folks with GPX detectors, and giving them hands-on tips in the field.  That's really an unprecedented amount of customer support and, given the dedication of DIV attendees, a smart investment by Minelab.

The most memorable quote from Kevin's GPX presentation was, "Culpeper soil is bad, but it's not Minelab bad."  I chuckled when he said it and thought it was good marketing, but it turned out to be true.

Fast forward to lunch time on the first day at DIV.  Other than the Eagle button and a Confederate Gardner bullet, I hadn't found too much.  I sat down on a knoll with my good friend and fellow blogger Tony Stevenson, and we ate a leisurely lunch while gazing out over the rolling hills of Virginia.  Another friend of mine, Culpeper local and longtime relic-hunter Frank, called and informed me that he could meet us at a location where they'd found some good relics at a previous DIV.  So Tony and I headed to that site, turned on our machines, and started to hunt.

It wasn't long afterward that I looked up and saw Tony holding something in his outstretched palm, detector on the ground, while someone photographed what he was holding.  I knew that he'd found something good, but it turned out to be something truly spectacular.  It wasn't long before Tony was surrounded by dozens of admirers.  I hunkered down and began to hunt in earnest.

And immediately, I started getting a lot of good signals.  In rapid succession, I dug a few Williams cleaner bullets, some button backs, and a carved button.  This locale, situated below the heights of Hansbrough Ridge alongside a stream-bed, had apparently been a campsite—covered by tents, abuzz with martial activity, punctuated by the sounds of camp life, bugles, and occasionally, musket fire or the formidable but exhilarating "whoomp" of artillery.  But for the hidden relics, one would never know that that world, so distant in time, had existed right where we stood.  All that could be heard was the wind, the warbling hum of metal detector threshold, and the buzz of conversation.  All that could be seen was rows of tilled field warming in the Virginia sun.

Gone with the wind ...

I was starting to get the hang of the GPX and began to understand its language and tones when I got another good signal.  Hoping for another bullet, I dug a 10" plug and ran the coil over it.  Nothing.  I held the coil over the hole and got an even louder tone with zero blanking.  Whatever was still in there was deep and unmistakeably  good.

Two more shovels full of dirt and I had the target out of the ground and the second I laid my eyes on it I realized that I'd just found my first plate.  I picked it up, took off my glove, and held something that was last touched by a soldier in the Civil War, standing on this very spot.

Eagle Breast Plate seconds after recovery

Curious, I placed my Predator Tools Big Red shovel into the hole.  The blade on this formidable digging tool measures 13.5" indicating that the hole was about 15" deep.  Not only was this the deepest relic I'd ever found, but it was also the most significant.  Thanks to DIV and Minelab, I was able to touch a piece of history unseen for 150 years, save it from further deterioration, and share it with others.  That's what this blog is all about — thanks for stopping by.

Big Red shovel in the hole where the breastplate had lain for 150 years

A handful of history