Pete in MI
New member
Here is a link for Microsoft's Virtual Earth. You can click on the interactive map to view any state you want. You can zoom in at various levels to get closer and closer to an area you want to check out.
http://maps.live.com/
I found this useful in that as I was zooming closer and closer to where I live I saw small towns that are no longer towns...ones that existed in the 1800s and are now considered Lost Towns.
Another source you might want to try...even if you don't have a GPS receiver, is the Geocache website.
http://www.geocaching.com
While looking at places to geocache, I found loads of history about old towns that are no longer (like the ones I mentioned above). The history of the town is given, the GPS coordinates are given, people's comments who have gone there, and even a cache to look for...all these leads may provide just the info you need to go to a site with your detector and find some OLD coins. ANd even if you just went and found nothing I am sure the history of the place and standing in the town would make you better appreciate what we have today.
Many of the logging towns up here had problems. Some problems was a lack of water source nearby. Because of this fires from the lumbering mills burned down towns. They may have rebuilt and burned down again. Some towns just ran out of lumber. They didn't replant trees they just cut them down. A big thing I had noticed about most of the towns (either 'lost towns' or 'ghost towns') their history revealed diptheria killed lots and lots of people...many were children. One family lost all their children to diptheria just before Christmas. That had to have been hard to deal with. In many cases diptheria hit the same town more than once. I read that some who had gotten diptheria had it only a couple days before they succumbed to it and passed away.
The ghost town of Pere Cheney in Crawford county was one such town that had over 5,000 people in its hey day in the late 1800s. By 1920 it was down to about 20 people. It suffered from this disease more than once, had burnt down more than once - very tragic.
Anyway, you can see the information that can be gathered about a place just through Geocache website. And, using the Virtual Earth mapping program you can find the best roads to get to that location.
Happy detecting - be safe
http://maps.live.com/
I found this useful in that as I was zooming closer and closer to where I live I saw small towns that are no longer towns...ones that existed in the 1800s and are now considered Lost Towns.
Another source you might want to try...even if you don't have a GPS receiver, is the Geocache website.
http://www.geocaching.com
While looking at places to geocache, I found loads of history about old towns that are no longer (like the ones I mentioned above). The history of the town is given, the GPS coordinates are given, people's comments who have gone there, and even a cache to look for...all these leads may provide just the info you need to go to a site with your detector and find some OLD coins. ANd even if you just went and found nothing I am sure the history of the place and standing in the town would make you better appreciate what we have today.
Many of the logging towns up here had problems. Some problems was a lack of water source nearby. Because of this fires from the lumbering mills burned down towns. They may have rebuilt and burned down again. Some towns just ran out of lumber. They didn't replant trees they just cut them down. A big thing I had noticed about most of the towns (either 'lost towns' or 'ghost towns') their history revealed diptheria killed lots and lots of people...many were children. One family lost all their children to diptheria just before Christmas. That had to have been hard to deal with. In many cases diptheria hit the same town more than once. I read that some who had gotten diptheria had it only a couple days before they succumbed to it and passed away.
The ghost town of Pere Cheney in Crawford county was one such town that had over 5,000 people in its hey day in the late 1800s. By 1920 it was down to about 20 people. It suffered from this disease more than once, had burnt down more than once - very tragic.
Anyway, you can see the information that can be gathered about a place just through Geocache website. And, using the Virtual Earth mapping program you can find the best roads to get to that location.
Happy detecting - be safe