I have beeen fortunate in past years to find a couple of Battleground caches of Confederate minies and never could figure out why they were buried there. The Johnnies normally were not known for discarding good ammo.The first cache I found was in a Confederate camp just north of Mansfield 30 years ago.
Walking along a Civil War road bed I got a large signal with a Whites GEB detector and after digging down nearly three feet I uncovered over 5,000 dropped Marshall Texas enfield minies and slivers of wood that probably came from an ammo crate. It took several trips back to my truck to get them all out and this large stack was displayed in the Mansfield museum for many years. LaZouave has also hunted this site since then and found scattered Marshalls. The other cache(other than the Powdermill Cache) was dug just 2 miles east of our museum right beside Hwy 120 10 years ago. After the Battle of Mansfield remnants of the 19th Army Corps(Union) stopped here for a short time. I found over 800 perfect dropped C.S. Gardiner minies buried on the bank of Mayou's Bayou.Why were there buried there. Most likely no one will ever know. I also found several thousand Marshall minies close to the powdermill with my son in the early 70's. Caches of minies have been found at most of the Arsenals or Powdermills but it is really exciting to find one at a batlesite. It has been months since I posted on forum but I am still here and feeling some better but have a big hill to climb yet. coonboy
