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I think I have an Exclusive VIP ALL Access pass to a Ghost Town!! TURNS OUT I DO!!! :surprised:

robby4570

New member
I've started a thread over at another forum about getting access to a very cool site.

I think I have an Exclusive VIP ALL Access pass to a Ghost Town!!
I've been researching Ghost Towns in my area and have found a few within day-trip distance (we live in an RV so we can just drive it there for a multi day hunt) that seem promising. One in particular while not THE closest one is one of the closer ones to me and really piqued my interest. So I focused on it - we'll call it GT1 for now - about 3 weeks ago I started researching all the internet links I could, which led me to some local newspaper articles and some old books and maps. The maps are on a state funded server so they are free to the public and some of the maps import directly into Google Earth (my favorite tool) as overlays. I found a map from 1944 that still shows the location of about 10 structures that are now long gone. The town was active and populated from about the 1860's through the late 1940's and while no longer a town, some of the original families' descendants still live near there. And this is where my story takes an interesting twist...

In doing my research, I stumbled onto a link to - of all things - FACEBOOK!! There is a section of Facebook where people can log places they have been, and I found 10 people that say they have been to GT1 AND, one of them says he LIVES THERE!!! So I sent him a friend request and a message on Facebook which he answered almost immediately. He gave me his phone number and I called him. We talked for somewhere around half an hour and he invited me up to meet him, sit and go over my research and his stories that have been handed down in the family over the decades and to plan how we are going to try to bring the history of GT1 back to life. He is very interested in verifying (or disproving) some of the stories he has heard over his lifetime, and on a side note, he also is a scuba diver wanting to get a metal detector for diving with. Additionally, just before his father passed he told the sons that he had buried a mason jar of coins somewhere under the concrete slab of the old general store before the slab was poured. This guy's brother dug up that slab down to 6 feet looking for this cache. Only one small section of the slab got left in place so that the whole site wasn't destroyed - I told you this guy is into preserving the town's history - and we have that to start from as well.

I'll know more next week after I meet with "Mr. GT1". I'm (and I hope Y'all understand) keeping all of this really close to the vest right now, only 5 of us know any more of the details than what I have said here. I'm fairly confident that this site won't get pillaged as it is entirely on private lands - either Mr. GT1 or his neighbors' - and I am the only one he has spoken with about this. Since I live in an RV, I have no room to keep artifacts (other than a few coins if he allows me a few) so I assured him that any finds are his first and the county's Historical Society's second if he wants to donate them. All I want is to preserve the history of the town, be recognized for it, and maybe get an odd old coin or two.

Now, I have over 1125 hours detecting, 95% of that is on the beach. So if any of you full time dirt fishers have any tips or hints for this "novice" on how to preserve my finds - from the minute my digger touches the soil until I have it on the table at the house - I'd sure appreciate your input. This is all on forested land so cutting plugs isn't going to be an issue but I am pretty good at it when I have to do it.

So stay tuned to this thread and I will update it with finds and more info as I have them!
 
and it looks like we've got many more to come. We started at what was the original owner's homesite and Company Store site. This town was a turpentine camp and sawmill. In or about 1939 the turpentine still closed and the town mostly disappeared.

There's two of us doing the detecting with the land owner helping with the digging.

On the first hunt we started right at the store site and got some intriguing finds but nothing spectacular except for a complete Mason Jar lid (remember the story the owner's father told him about the jar of coins?).

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We found the lid under about a dozen metal plates and bricks about a foot down... the plates were just randomly stacked one on top of the other.

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We didn't find a jar of coins but it sure didn't make much sense why the lid, plates, and bricks were there. One thing we are up against is the owner's father had a scrap metal business back in the day and now there's a TON of trash in the ground along with the artifacts. My hunting buddy is using TTF with his E-Trac and is finding far better stuff than I with my Sovereign Elite and the Detech 5 inch Excellerator coil. On the second hunt my buddy brought along his DFX with the Eclipse coil and I got some goodies too.

Yesterday we got another 3 hours on-site and got some better finds. We did around the old house site (all the old buildings are gone) as well as the store site again. My buddy scored big with a token for Palmolive soap that we assume is very old (1920's) because it calls soap "cakes" of soap.

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Next he scored an old compact

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And a metal shaker of some type, salt or baby powder or foot powder...

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All of that came from the store site, my finds were far fewer and a lot more trash came up but I worked the old house site that was bulldozed in 2003 (it was built around 1900) so the ground was full of nails and house parts.

The only thing I got of note was what looks like a lipstick tube top...

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So, that's it for now but one last shot shows the house site (yellow "L" shape, the store site (yellow square at bottom) and a smoke house (small yellow square to the right of the house) where we are working.

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Thanks for looking and I will update this thread as thing proceed. Going back next Tuesday, weather permitting.
 
I love the history surrounding this place, I'm really getting into digging up (no pun intended) the history of this place on-line as well as the neat stuff we have pulled out of the ground. We only get about 3 hours a week out there due to weather and work schedule conflicts with me and the landowner, but we try to make the most of the time we have.

Subscribe for updates as I post them. I will keep updating this thread for those who have / do subscribe to it. Eventually I will post the on-line research results. Right now there is a bit of conflicting info on this place.

Oh, here's a picture of the Turpentine Still that was the heart of this town...

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I've started a "Secret" Facebook group just for those of us doing the research and digging along with a couple family members of the landowner and the landowner himself so that we can easily collaborate. All along the landowner has been telling us about a "barn" (#2 in the picture) that one corner of was leaning against a tree that sat on the property behind what is now his house. He said the "barn" was very old, possibly even turn of the last century old. He knew that the original house (#3 in the picture) was the owner's house and that there was a smokehouse (#4) and a Commissary - company store -(#5) and that he was pretty sure of the locations of each.

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Turns out on the commissary that he was pretty darned close and on the main house he was right on. He had grown up living in the house but the commissary was gone before he was born. He has told us that the kitchen in the house was HUGE, like it fed an army. In fact the kitchen table sat 16! This does lead me to believe the house was the home of original owners of the still.

Well... I posted the picture of the still on our group the other day and the landowner saw it last night and commented that it looks just like the "barn" that was leaning against the tree (the tree is still there and it may be the one in the front right corner of the still in that old picture. From what the land owner told us BEFORE seeing that picture of the still and then reading the newspaper article that accompanied the photo of the still, I have to say that the still and the "barn" may very well be one in the same. The barn was torn down several years ago because it was falling down and unsafe. The land owner said he did the demo on the "barn" himself and was very careful not to drop a lot of trash and nails doing it, so there should very little metal debris to pick through.

Building #1 in the picture is an unknown at this point, an old 1944 map overlay shows a structure there where the "1" is and old satellite imagery shows a disturbance in the ground cover but we can't pin down what it was and it was gone before the landowner was born. Of course the old map could be wrong too...

STAY TUNED, going back out on Tuesday to get some more "swing time" in - weather permitting.
 
It would appear as if the token is PRE 1928 since Palmolive-Peet merged with Colgate and became The Colgate-Palmolive-Peet Company in 1928 and the token doesn't mention Colgate...

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Well, we gambled on the weather today - rain predicted - and were rewarded with a 4 hour hunt. Craig with his E-Trac in TTF (he's really loving TTF the more he works with it) and me with his DFX and the small Eclipse coil.

We didn't pull up a lot of items today but we got some nails from the old Commissary building, an older 30-30 rifle cartridge (that the land owner says pre-dates his family), 2 shot shell bases, a really old hinge plate and lots of trash.

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Here's the current area we are working where the commissary stood...

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Here's a panoramic stitch of three shots off my cel phone, not the best pic but good enough. This is the site of the Commissary (company store) near the manager's home site...

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Well, we hit the site of the Commissary and manager's house again. Craig did the house site and I did the Commissary site. Started off pulling parts of the store, hinges and metal plates and other items I couldn't identify. Here's a few of the items we pulled up, I haven't gotten all of the items in my finds pouch photographed yet:

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And then there was THIS!


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Don't know if it's really gold, how old it is or if it has a real stone (the stone looked green in the sunlight) but it came up 23 and ring on the DFX...
 
I will keep updating as we go, usually one day a week for a few hours a day. We still have some finds that I haven't gotten out of my finds pouch to photograph from last week, hopefully I'll have time to do it today. We are going back out tomorrow (weather permitting) and I'll have more to post tomorrow as well.

Here's a pic of one of the original owners of the Turpentine still...

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Looks as if we may be rained out today :surrender: It's been raining since 430AM and coming down pretty hard. It is finally letting up and we aren't scheduled to go out until afternoon, so who knows.... :?:

Anyway, here are some pic's of the items I got last week that didn't make it out of my finds bag...

A big rusty iron bracket of some sort
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Some sort of electric light fixture, looks really old...
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What appears to be a LARGE bullet or maybe a shoutgun slug
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Coins, all have been modern so far, we'll see when I clean these...
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All of the items laid out in a box lid, straight from the finds pouch...
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And with this post we are current as of 2/25/2014. I started this little adventure Dec 22 2013 and here we are. So I will keep updating this thread as finds are made, we got rained out today so it will be sometime next week before I get back out there but keep checking in for updates!
 
Robby, I found your hunt of this ghost town very interesting and enjoyed following your posts. Did you give up on this spot? Hope to see more great finds.
HH
 
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