Bullet and Shell Civil War Projectiles Forum
Relic Discussion => Artillery => Topic started by: Scott Springston on May 30, 2020, 10:02:57 AM
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I love to hear relic hunting stories , especially shell hunting stories so I’m going to start off this thread with one of my stories.
When I was a kid I wanted a metal detector in n the worst way but could never afford one. A friend let me borrow a Old Metro Tech and I tried looking around the yard but all I could find was stuff practically on the surface. The ground was pretty bad where I lived. Then I heard of the local relic hunters association and I went to some of their meetings. These guys were showing off all the confederate buckles and buttons they had found and the best thing I’d ever found was a rusty nail. I tried to talk to some of the guys to find out how they found such good stuff but if you weren’t one of the in crowd who recently found a CS plate they didn’t want to bother with you. Their suggestion was to go to Governors, a relic shop and buy a bunch of relics and then come back and act like I found them. Then people might talk to me. Finally a nice guy volunteered a place I might try that was dug out but better than nothing . I went there and tried that metro tech but it wouldn’t work . I needed a good metal detector so I got a job that summer to get enough money to buy a metal detector. Whites seemed to be the choice then so after half the summer of working I saved $350 to buy a detector! I bought a new detector and figured I was good to go but then it hit me I still had no idea where to look. I went back to that place the guy told me of and actually found a bullet or two! I still wondered how these guys knew where to look so I went back to the relic club but as relic hunters are so often they were very tight lipped. It’s like you were trying to find gold they buried and you we’re trying to get it. They only wanted to talk to you if you were one of the good old boys who had found a load of stuff. I heard the phrase do your research more than once but research where? In What?? I had no idea where to look. I finally got a map of the defenses of Washington and at one of the forts it mentioned that Connecticut troops where stationed there. I though where can I find stuff about them and then my dad said let’s go to the library of congress and see if they had anything. He went there often. Well we went there and I found this regimental history of those troops and on one page it told of them shooting their big guns about a mile across the way at a big wooden target. It said the shells were flipping and sinking into the mud. I got the modern topo map of that area , drew a mile circle around the fort and looked for likely places for them to shoot at. I noticed there was a hill on the other side of the big highway that would make a good target and I took my new detector and went over there. There were houses all around the area but there was one little patch of woods between them so I put the detector to the ground and soon I get this big signal! Oh it must be a garbage can or something I thought but I dug anyway . I kept going down , deeper and deeper thinking it must be the mineralized soil and nothing’s really down there. I kept digging and then I hit something iron like. I said I must have hit a water pipe or something but then I saw that it was the nose of a 100 lb bolt! I couldn’t believe it! So far I’d only found a bullet or two and now this monster shell! Anyway I invited a friend over who was a relic hunter and after about a week we had dug over 30 shells out of that tiny spot! I knew right then that my destiny was shells!
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So a while after finding all those shells I went back to the relic club and of course now everyone wanted to talk to me. Hey, where’d you find those? Let’s go dig some more, when do you want to go? They suddenly got very chummy. When I hadn’t found anything they didn’t even want to give me the time of day but now they were real friendly! I realized they weren’t the kind of people I wanted to be around so eventually I found two good buddies to hunt with
And never went back to that club.
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When I was a young man my dad and I made reprints of Civil War books out of print. We were at this show trying to sell them and Tom Dicky walked up eagerly looked at one of books. A few minutes later he came back with the set of his set of his red projectile books and traded them for our reprint of Mosbys War Reminiscences . He asked me to come to his table and there was one of his big Dyers he was trying to sell. I’d never seen anything so cool but I didn’t have $150 or so he was asking for it . $150!!! Now when I see a nice one I try and get it!!
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Great stories! I enjoyed reading them, thanks!
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I got started with a good friend whose family just happened to move into a house that had a detector in the closet left by the previous owner. They lived in the middle of The Battle of Kolb Farm near Kennesaw Mtn and were able to find a few neat things. My friend joined Boy Scouts where we met. He invited me hunting with him and we found a few things. My first good day was in the front yard of another friend I went to school with who lived near the battle and got permission from his parents for us to come look in their yard. I found bullets, a Bormann fuse, a snuff box and some other interesting things. That front yard went away many years later with a 2-lane to 5-lane road widening. But one day my friend and I both found a 12-lber solid shot. From then on the other stuff was neat but artillery was the focus.
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Yes I know the feeling, it’s hard to explain but once I found a shell buttons seemed insignificant. Thanks for sharing!
Scott
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My first shell piece find ever was a small parrot nose fragment. I had gone up and down these hills and ravines for close to a mile for weeks figuring the area to be a spot they may have fired at and after digging down a foot or so and pulling up old oil filters from a tractor etc I came across the fragment. It was very encouraging and I hunted a lot more but found nothing. The funny thing is that it wasn’t much more than a block from where I eventually found the shell hole! I kept that fragment as a reminder to never give up!
Scott
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As far as relic hunting was concerned it seems I was born too late for the easy pickings of the Dicky days or I found out about stuff to late. I had researched a confederate battery on the river and walked a mile or so through no mans land to get to it hoping to at least find something. There was a story how the confederates had buried their ammunition when they abandoned the fort. When I got there I started hunting out on the perimeter of the fort and quickly made my way to the fort walls over looking the river. There I found this huge hole that couldn’t have been dug more than a few days before. I kept hunting and found nothing. Just recently, well over 30 years later I met the fellow who had dug the hole and he showed me some of the rarest shells I’d ever seen that came from that hole. Sometimes you just can’t win.
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Yes, there is nothing like the sound of the shovel hitting a shell. Nothing sounds like it. You try to avoid it because of sabots and fuses but when digging that deep it can happen.
They are still out there. People in our club have dug about 5 in the past couple months. And none of them are just shell hunters. They hunt everything. The artillery that is left is just a lot more spread out. It will be hard to find an impact area with shells scattered all over it like in the past but something gets missed.
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Great stories. I love it.
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It seemed like wherever I looked a million other guys had already been there. I was hunting on this hill where a camp had been and of course it was said to be hunted out. Thats the only kind of place any relic hunter would recommend going to. I finally got this big signal but I could tell it was iron so I figured it was junk. I dug down a little and hit iron. I started to uncover it and it looked to be a rusty tin can but upon further Investigaton I found it was a shovel head. I kept digging and low and behold it turned out to be a fire pit no one had found before. It was loaded with cool stuff. Buckles, bullets, soles from shoes and other neat stuff . The best things though were the intact beer bottles! After that I always dug everything, brass sounding or iron sounding.
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At one point I had about 30 shells that needed unloading and I was told to take them to the local expert. I pulled up to his house, a town house right next to many other townhouses and went through his fence and piled them in his yard. He had a little hole in the dirt about 10 inches deep partially full of water. He put them between his feet and proceeded to drill them out with a hand drill. I heard he did thousands of them that way! I’m glad I didn’t live next door to him, ha ha!
Scott
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Crazy old days!
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I had some shells that you could literally pour out the powder. I collected a bunch of it and dried it out. Later we poured a pile of it on the ground and it flashed up just like I’d poured gunpowder out of a keg in an old western movie!!
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Maybe I should have said this before but feel free to share stories like these or any other interesting stories that you’ve had in your relic hunting days!
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Anyone still alive that remembers the story of Dicky finding that Bunch of Dyers and his boat sinking and law troubles etc?
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There must be someone here who hunted with Gregg Craven who’s willing to share some of those epic shell finding adventures?
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I am working on securing a tape of Tom Dickey's "Confessions of a Relic Hunter" presentation at the Atlanta Civil War Roundtable. I will figure out a way for folks to listen to it when I do.
Pete George is on this website periodically and will recall those stories.
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I've heard the stories of Tom Dickey hunting Island #10 and having to take a trailer when he went hunting to handle the load. I recall hearing how he once brought a trailer load of the Dyers to the Marietta Show to sell although I didn't see that as I wasn't doing shows until the late 80's. Tom found out about and got access to the Island #10 site via another relic hunter friend who lived in Marietta, GA and had a family connection up there. This friend took him and they hit pay dirt. I ended up with a copy of a map that they made where every time they dug a shell they marked it on the map to help them define the impact area. They figured location based on a couple roads and telephone poles. The years on the map show the finds from 1981 and later so it appears it was 1981 when they started digging there.
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Scott,
Pete George told that Tom Dickey story at Tom Henrique’s house during the fall Gettysburg show some years ago. It included a sinking boat and Tom heaving shells toward the shore. Pete could post it if he sees this.
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I love this! I hope Pete posts what he remembers!
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I have a few to tell but the statute of limitations might not have run on the incidents If asked I might be persuaded to pry a few loose but they involve hunting on government land and his old station wagon. Gary
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Gary,
True that! And some hunting buddies might not like stories shared too. But there are plenty out there that can. When I get a chance I'll share a couple. I'm occupied for the next couple days but will get on it after that. Hopefully Steve and some others can as well.
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We all know relic hunters go on places they shouldn’t be it government land or some guys pristine front yard. You don’t need to tell exactly where you were , just tell of the adventure of finding and getting the shell dug. Years ago these fellows would tell me of finding these experimental shells in the woods on a government facility. I never had the nerve to go there but some cool stuff came out of there and today it’s probably covered in black top.
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I may or may not have said this earlier but I gave up shell hunting over 30 years ago for several reasons, although now I wish I hadn’t. First of all I was running out of places to look and secondly were some nasty incidents that turned me off to hunting. The most obvious was the time we were hunting down in Stafford Va. We had researched this spot back in the woods and we suspected the spot was on this fellows property. We decided to do the right thing and go ask for permission so we left our detectors in the car and parked our car outside their gate and proceeded to walk up the drive way to the house to ask permission. Half way up it a truck pulls up and a angry person ( a woman) yells get the blankety blank out of here so we turned around and walked back to the car. When we got back to our car the hood was up and my distributor cap and spark plug wires were gone! Imagine the fun of replacing those in the middle of no where with the only way out was a couple mile walk. That put a big crimp in my desire to hunt anymore and a crimp in ever asking permission again, ha ha!
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Ok I'll post a few sanitized stories tomorrow. Gary
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My Father and I where luck enough through eraser has to find a earthwork fortification in the low country. Long story on how we got permission but needless to say it had not been hunted. The place was a gold mind of shells, 6.4 and 5.1 schenkles, 30lber parrots with brass naval fuses, hotchkiss and the ever rare 5.1 JAD shells. We pulled 167 whole shells out of that place as well as a bunch of fuses and unique shell fragments. We took one of our hunting buddies there and the word got out. Tom heard of the place and was headed there so we met up with him and a few other guys the only name I remember was OK Jackson. He was still driving that station wagon and we all hunted all day. The only two whole shells to come out that day were both 5.1 JAD's found by me and OK Jackson. Tom always the gentleman offered to trade me a shell for the one I found. Gary
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On another occasion, while hunting a large plantation in the low country that my father and I had made amazing finds, wentworths bullets, buckles buttons etc. (but had never possessed official permission to search) we were headed back to hit it when I saw Toms station wagon parked by a church where we always park d. I told my dad that this was a bad sign because he had gotten caught in there before and as such his wagon was known. Dad was the boss so we when in. Each time we came close to being escorted off the property we slipped out because the caretaker drove an old pickup that you could hear a mile away. This time thanks to his recognizing Tom's wagon parked at the church he came in on horseback with M1 Hanging from his shoulder. After being caught we were escorted to his home to determine our fate ( many caretakers were deputized in the low country) the only thing that saved us from being nicked was the fact that he had bought a metal detector (Heathkit) and we were using Nautilus LF's so we showed him how to use our machines in his front yard. His front yard was loaded with relics and my Dad and I got the opportunity to watch as he pulled up some great stuff. Tom is central to this because the care taker was after him but saw us first. He slipped out and we got caught. We had a laugh over that later but at the time we were far from happy. I always wondered why he was at that spot in light of fact that there was never a shell found there. Gary
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Great stories!! Love it!!
Scott
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This one time I had found a spot way back in the woods where a trail of shells had landed, seemingly one right after another. I had dug several and laid them there and was just about to pull another one from a hole in the ground when a foot came out of no where and landed on top of the shell. I looked up and there was this giant guy standing on my shell and he simply said ,mine!! My land, my shells now skedaddle and I did , empty handed.