Teddybear said:
I'm still in my first year of this hobby..............Still no silver.....Not sure what I'm doing wrong?.....Location and knowledge I guess..Found some cool stuff.....bout 100.00 in change so far..Maybe 15 wheats in all.From what year do the silver dimes etc start?..Oh I did find a treasure trove of boyscout medallions at a burnt down church......Are churches generally ok to detect or should you ask a paster etc?..Sounds like your doing pretty darn good my friend.......Dave in Balto
There is a persistent notion that the ground we walk upon is littered with silver coins, just waiting to be exhumed. Sorry, not so.
It has been nearly 50 years since the last silver was issued for circulation. In that time there have been at least TWO meltdown periods, where the price of silver made it worth more to melt the coins than hold them. We are in yet another. We are also in the 4th Detector Age - hobby models came into being at the same time the production of silver coins was halted. Any place you can see or think of has probably been viewed by another detector owner, likely before you were even born. So there has been an earnest and ongoing effort to remove these coins from the face of the planet.
To be blunt, many are just plain gone.
Additionally, silver coins were worth something - they had intrinsic value. Back when they were in use, there was no such thing as easy credit and worthless junk coins, backed by nothing but an indebted government. It's likely it cost only a dime to go to that theater, or whatever was there, because a dime was worth far more than we associate it with. Flatly put, people didn't run around with pockets full of them and they hung on to them. They looked for them when they were lost.
Also, keep in mind that when you are viewing these forums, you are seeing many of the same people, over and over. You are also looking at a small cadre of enthusiasts, where little else is displayed. All you are going to see is what they find. Nothing about Sarah Palin, the latest celebrity gossip or good recipes for chicken are seen. These folks spend endless hours at this, and may do little else. Lightning may strike all of us, if we stand out in the storms long enough. Here, you are seeing these collected lightning strikes for viewing.
Now, it is obvious that silver coins are out there. People find them, ergo, they exist - right?
But it is a safe bet they only rarely find them in the usual places. Schools, public venues, parks and so on are nearly devoid of them. There may be a few here and there, of course, as any one thing can be anywhere. But the odds are against very many of them being found this way. A few, perhaps, but that is it.
The best places now are those no one else knows about, like that section of earth that once held up an old theater. The OP found them through blind luck, but it points out one fact that is paramount:
they were in a place no one else knew to look, and did not have access to so they could look.
This is why you hear so much about research and private property access. Only by knowing what others do not, such as where people of yesteryear gathered in large numbers, can you up your odds. Since people eventually lose things, the more people that gathered in an area the better the odds they lost coins. Find a spot where many of them actively gathered, 60 or 80 years ago, and your chances go way up. This is why not every old place holds masses of silver coins... it is possibly NOT the sort of place where they were lost. Old farm houses fall into this category - farmers are notoriously cash-strapped!
The best places, those that are most untouched, are usually found on private property or well off the beaten path. The OP here had a property owners permission to be there. Other folks will research "ghost" locations, places people no longer go. However, these are very often found on private property, since there is no "unowned" land in this country. Research is easy enough to do - I can show you many places in my area that probably hold old coins. They also happen to be on land that is privately owned.
The message here is clear - silver coins are not easy to find. Dumb luck sometimes steps in and the find of a lifetime occurs. It happens to all of us, this "Lightning Effect."
But to produce coins consistently requires effort, knowledge, and a certain doggedness the T.V. ads don't tell you about. After all, if it
were as easy as the detector manufacturers suggest, everyone would do it.
