700 Civil War Era Gold Coins Found
Grab Your Metal Detector and Head South. . .
An Astonishing Find of 700 Coins Buried in a Kentucky Field Makes You Wonder . . . Is There Even More to Be Found?
A man in Kentucky recently made one of the most important and valuable discoveries of buried treasure ever. It happened in a farmer’s field, where he dug up more than 700 Civil War-era gold coins with an estimated value of well more than $1 million.
You can read the story in “Kentucky man finds over 700 Civil War-era coins buried in his Cornfield” by Kristina Kilgrove in LiveScience.com.
Why Kentucky?
That’s a good question to ask. According to experts interviewed by Kristina Kilgrove, the coins were probably buried by someone who wanted to conceal them from the advancing Confederate army of General John Hunt Morgan in 1863. (Kentucky was neutral at that time, neither part of the Confederate or Union alliances. So when an army like Morgan’s was about to pass through the state, raiding and stealing property from homes along the way, it was only natural that people would bury valuables as a way of concealing them.
Why did the Kentuckian who buried those coins never return for them? After so many years, it is doubtful we will ever know.
Is Still More Civil War Treasure Waiting to Be Found?
If one buried treasure was recently found in Kentucky, it seems entirely possible that many more will be found by precious metal hunters using metal detectors. So, is it time to head south and start looking?
It can’t be a bad idea. Just bear in mind that the treasure you find will belong to whoever owns the land where you found it. Even if you find treasure in a state park or on public land, it will probably not belong completely to you. So before you invest time hunting for treasure, it is best to determine who owns the land where you will be hunting and to obtain permission to go prospecting.
And Where Are the Best Places to Look?
You can identify promising southern locations by taking some of these steps:
Read Civil War histories to identify the locations of battles and encampments.
Contact local historical societies to ask about battle and encampment sites.
Speak with historians at local colleges and ask their opinion about where the most promising prospecting sites could be.
Dig in and speak with local citizens. Sometimes the people at local coffee shops in smaller towns will be able to talk about battlefields and other sites that would be good choices for metal-detector prospecting. This is a time-consuming and labor-intensive way to identify local prospecting sites. But the information you obtain from local people could be much more useful – and potentially profitable – than the intelligence you can gather online.