Need help finding old parks

Tripleseven

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I live in southern California and it's very difficult finding old areas to dig. Anyone have any tips? Thanks!
 
I live in southern California and it's very difficult finding old areas to dig. Anyone have any tips? Thanks!

The guys I know in So. CA, who are getting old silver coins from the park, are simply opening up a map, determining the oldest parts of the towns, and simply going to the parks located in those older districts.

You can go to http://historicalmaps.arcgis.com/usgs/ to determine the older parts of each town. Or just look at the surrounding homes and buildings, to get an idea of the era in which the side of town was getting started.

It will be hit and miss. Some parks might have been re-sodded at some point in the past. Others will be too blighted and junky (in the ghetto-parts of cities). Others might be hammered to smithereens already. But if you look at some of the posts of So. CA md'rs, they're not lacking to find silver.

Or did you mean seateds and reales and such ? If so, good luck. That's one of the downsides of So. CA hunting, is everything is an asphalt sprawl. And population booms took off in the 1920s, covering that earlier history. So a way to crack into the earlier coins like seateds and barbers, is to watch for old town urban demolition jobs. Ie.: "follow the bulldozers" when they're on an old town tearout. Esp. if it's a park scrape in an old park (like to make way for a tennis court or artificial turf )
 
I lived in South County for 40 years, moved here to Oregon, last year from Rancho Santa Margarita.

as far as Old goes.. Around there the Oldest area is San Juan Capistrano with the Mission being built around 1775, I would go explore the area since it is less than 10 miles from you.

Obviously you can't MD the Mission but look around the Rios District. My old lawyer Steve Rios family has the oldest standing Adobe house there in the state.

When I first moved to Mission Viejo in 1974 pretty much all of South County was Orange Groves and the 5 freeway was like 2 lanes each side so Not a lot of really old areas unless you go to SJC, San Clemente or farther South.


As far as Parks and Ball fields etc.. you live in the Family Sports capital of the State.. (Lots of Soccer Moms losing the good Jewelry)

You might also cruise around the Lake over by you in LN or even the lake in RSM which is pretty huge, and they have the fourth of July festivities there every year.. I would be there crack of dawn on July 5th.

you are also 5 miles from the beach down Crown Valley but a TON of Competition there.


Good luck to you!!
 
Another way to get old coins in So. CA is to study for beach erosion. Tides + on-shore swells, + on-shore winds = beach erosion. When that happens, it can produce old coins. Trouble is, that might be few and far between, and you have to know how/when to be there at the right time. Also some past erosion events (1982-83, for instance) cut in so far, that it's seemingly all clad now (albeit copious amounts, and albeit chances at jewelry) in modern erosion events. Still though, I see occasional posts of guys who've still gotten silver during erosion down there.

There's also even some spots on the dry sand that can give up silver coins (albeit perhaps just 1940s/50s losses). This is because during the 1940s/50s, the army corps of engineers went up and down the coast there, doing jetties ever few miles . And various harbors walled in, etc... This had the effect of trapping the dry sand zones , on some beaches, such that it never erodes in or out ever again. But in those zones, you'd need to go 1 ft. deep or deeper. So you'd need something like a pulse with big coil, or Sov/Wot combo. But I know a guy who got over 100 silver coins from a certain dry sand beach doing this trick, listening for whispers. At other beaches, the dry sand will be strictly fill following erosion of past decades. And would be hopeless to ever find an old coin there . So you just got to know where the trick works for certain zones that have remained un-disturbed for 60 to 70 yrs.
 
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