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Indian Head Penny-dant!

AirmetTango

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Joined
Apr 14, 2017
Messages
3,111
Location
NW Ohio
Winter made a sudden arrival today in my neck of the woods - it was 50° yesterday, but today (Tuesday) was about 28°, plus a good stiff wind!! There’s no doubt that time is just about expired on this year’s hunting season, but I’m determined to eek out as much time as I can before the ground freezes.

So I put aside some work I was supposed to be doing and snuck out this afternoon for about 2 hours. We had a good amount of rain yesterday, so I decided to hit a close-by park rather than mess around with a quagmire in a field. Despite the cold, the ground conditions were nearly perfect for digging!

The very first diggable signal turned out to be a Wheatie from about 6” down - not a bad start for a pounded to death park :yes: I dared to hope maybe a silver coin might be lurking, but that never happened...instead I ended up with $2.14 in clad, a second Wheat and a toasty IHP with an unreadable date.

But by far my favorite find of the day happened about halfway through the hunt. I got over a decent high tone, varying mostly between 20-22 on the VDI, but with occasional jumps as high as 23 as I circled the target. It’s a park, so bottle caps are everywhere, but I’ve also been teasing several IHPs out of the ground here lately. The tell is depth...my “trash & clad” pic at the bottom shows 3 caps that I dug on wishful thinking - the depth just wasn’t quite deep enough on those. But this signal looked spot on for depth! I cut my plug, then needed to remove some more dirt from the hole after my pointer sounded off in the bottom. A few more scoops with my digger, and I saw speckles of bright turquoise mixed with the dark brown dirt - crumbles of copper corrosion. Several of the coppers I’ve dug at this park have been badly corroded to the point that they have large nodes/concretions of turquoise colored oxidation. Once I saw those crumbles, I was excited because I knew I had a coin, but simultaneously worried because I knew the condition would probably be rough. A few moments later, I tracked down the penny sized target with my pinpointer - corroded on one side, but...what the heck?? There was something hooked to it!!

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An Indian Head made into a pendant...with the clasp still attached!! The clasp is tiny, but I was amazed to see some delicate scroll work on its surface as I cleaned the item. The front of the Indian cleaned up beautifully, but unfortunately, that corrosion on the back is brutal - I cleaned as much as I could without breaking through the patina and exposing shiny bronze. It appears to be a 1907 IHP - when I first saw that “7”, I immediately thought “Oh Lord....tell me they didn’t drill through an 1877!!” :lol: :lol:

It’s curious that the maker chose to drill the pendant such that Lady Liberty would have hung upside down. I’ve found one other holed coin (also an IHP), and it was drilled directly over the top of her head, which seems a more “natural” way for a pendant to hang :?:

Anyway, I’m thrilled with the find - a unique personal item that surely has a interesting story to tell if it could only talk!!
 

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Sweet find!I love finds like this but I would be saying same thing in my head....Please NOT 1877!!![emoji23][emoji23]

Sent from my SM-N975U using Tapatalk
 
Always good to find something that is personalized. Even the clasp has a little Fancy on it. I can imagine some young guy making it for a gal that he wanted to impress.
 
Man Ben you find some cool shat. Congrats on a great hunt, the Ihp pendant is an awesome recovery. Its always gratifying to pull one or two old coins from a pounded public place. The deep bottle caps and pulltabs always get me, I think, well maybe, and dig it. A s far as the weather, day to day. Good luck Mark
 
Hunting while you can, seems to be the theme these days Ben. Congrats on the Wheat's and the Indian's from that hard hunted park. The hard freeze hit us for the last two nights so it will be very unlikely we will have any more outings here this year. Still will hope for a warm up. Trapper
 
As I worked through your pictures, first, I had the SAME reaction you did. Oh, no! 1877! Then when I saw the cleaned up 9, i felt better, but at the same time... worse.

Wish you'd found an 1877, that was ID'able!

Still, Super fun hunt. thanks for sharing!

Skippy
 
Sweet find!I love finds like this but I would be saying same thing in my head....Please NOT 1877!!![emoji23][emoji23]

As I worked through your pictures, first, I had the SAME reaction you did. Oh, no! 1877! Then when I saw the cleaned up 9, i felt better, but at the same time... worse.

Wish you'd found an 1877, that was ID'able!

Still, Super fun hunt. thanks for sharing!

Skippy

Thanks bucknut! Thanks Skippy!

I know, right?? It would have been just my luck to find an 1877 as a holed coin!! :facepalm::crying: And once that “7” was clean and clear but the “9” was still covered, I honestly wasn’t sure which to root for!! In the end, I think I’m grateful that the “9” turned out to be identifiable - just so I knew for sure what I had. It would be awesome to find an 1877 in any condition, but in this case, that hole completely obliterated the third number...if the second number had been an “8”, I’d have gone absolutely bats wondering if my 18x7 holed Indian was the real deal ;)

No worries - I absolutely love this Indian pendant! Truly one of my favorite finds for the year just for the uniqueness of it!

...And my pristine 1877 Indian is on the way, I can feel it :laughing:
 
That is a really cool find!

Thanks ynnek!

Great find. Very nice and special how the ringy is decorated.

Thanks beest! Yep, I was thrilled and surprised to see that the hanger thing had some fine scrolling detail on it. To my eye, that confirms a turn-of-the-century time frame for the whole piece - and maybe adds evidence that this was a special item to whoever originally owned and lost it.
 
Always good to find something that is personalized. Even the clasp has a little Fancy on it. I can imagine some young guy making it for a gal that he wanted to impress.

Thanks Dan! Yes, I would love to hear the entire story behind it - why and for whom it was made, when it was lost...did the date have a special meaning? Did the coin itself have a sentimental value? First penny earned? So many possibilities, and of course, the answers are all lost to time.
 
Man Ben you find some cool shat. Congrats on a great hunt, the Ihp pendant is an awesome recovery. Its always gratifying to pull one or two old coins from a pounded public place. The deep bottle caps and pulltabs always get me, I think, well maybe, and dig it. A s far as the weather, day to day. Good luck Mark

Thanks Mark! Yep, it really has been fun hunting this park in particular. I’ve only just starting hunting it over the last couple months - I never bothered with it before, because I figured it had been hunted to death and can’t possibly have anything left...just a waste of time to hunt. Well, every hunt has been surprisingly productive, and maybe even more fun because of the challenge! Several of my favorite finds for the year have come out of the ground there, including my oldest silver coin! But perhaps more importantly, it’s not only been tremendous fun, but I’ve also learned a lot about my detector in the process of dealing with the trashy conditions.

Yep, I agree - the bottle caps will always get me, too...the majority of the time, I know exactly what it’s likely to be, but I just can’t help digging it anyway “just in case” :lol: The ones that genuinely fool me are the broken off beaver tails like the one in my trash pic - I genuinely thought I had a nickel, and maybe an old one, too. The dang thing rang up a perfectly solid 13, and because it’s relatively small, it displayed deeper than it was - 4 shovels, which is supposed to be 6-8”. I had dreams of a Buff or V, instead out pops vintage can parts from 4 or 5” :furious: :dash2: :lol:
 
Hunting while you can, seems to be the theme these days Ben. Congrats on the Wheat's and the Indian's from that hard hunted park. The hard freeze hit us for the last two nights so it will be very unlikely we will have any more outings here this year. Still will hope for a warm up. Trapper

Thanks Trapper! Yep, gotta get the hunts in any way I can, while I can! I’m sorry to hear your season might be done. We’re supposed to get a minor warm spell (above freezing anyway) for a few days at the tail end of this week - maybe you’ll get s slight reprive, also!

Great job on the hunt , finds ,photos , narrative and clean up .

Thanks Soil Surgeon!”

Nice job braving the weather. Congrats!

Thanks Jim! It was one of those cold, windy days where your nose just runs like a faucet...but honestly it felt worse than it was only because it was so unseasonably warm the couple of days before!
 
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