Endless winter over my foot. Forty degrees and than incessant chill wind again today. The leaves are not even sprouting on the trees yet, and that’s usually a mid March thing around here. I would have toughed it out if I still didn’t have a cold, but I called it a day after an hour or so.
So, rather than working or researching, which I should be doing, I wanted to post one of my little stories from my cross country trip from last year (something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, but who has the time?). It wasn’t a detecting trip, but I did do a little detecting along the way.
This is from 6/11/12, in Kokomo Indiana. I had about 2 hours to detect while there, and found a map online from 1877. Below is the section I found interesting, due to the “Normal School” (whatever that means). Old schools always seem a reasonable place to start.
But what’s there now? Here’s the GE of the block that school was on.
Sweet! A parking lot. Its either public property, or close enough, I imagine, and there are plenty of grassy areas. I figured it would be hunted out, but it was worth a shot.
And it was mostly hunted out, but I did score a 1939 merc and a couple of wheaties for my trouble, on the west side. In two hours, I didn’t cover much more than that. There just as easily could have been a seated there, given the age of the block. Maybe there is.
Its really hard to drive into a town you know nothing about, and find a place that might have silver, much less find one (I failed in a previous town in Ohio the day before, tho I did get some deep wheaties there), so that was cool. Add Indiana to the list of states I’ve found silver in.
So, that’s that. If you can’t find silver, you can still write about finding it in the past, and in any case, certainly better than yesterday’s train wreck (and yeah, we prolly need to reinstate the morning edit). There are three or four more installments to this series; hopefully I’ll find the time to do them in the next 10 years.
A “Normal School” was an institute to train high school kids to be teachers. My Alma Mater started as a Normal school, why they let me in, will never know. 🙂 Don’t reinstate the morning edits please. I like the posts the way you first write them!
And there were a lot of Normal schools, since there were schools every couple miles prior to the days of bussing and they needed lots of teachers. So a high percentage of schools were Normal. It is quite a feat to go in “cold” and pull silver. I doubt I could do it. I am still surprised when research pays off and I find stuff right where I thought it should be. If the ground ever thaws here, I have a bevy of sites researched, most on public land, where buildings once stood. Using Google Earth overlay technique from your tutorial, I should be able to hit those spots with a GPS and get the goods if there are any. Despite these being obscure sites, likely never hunted and the hours I spent properly prepping, I’ll still be shocked when one of them actually produces!