Cool Finds

[bigcreek]

I was helping my folks with an addition to their house which is close to 100 years old. I cut a piece out of the wall where the door would go and gave it a good kick to knock it over and when that small part of the wall fell over a penny came flying up out of the wall right in front of me. It was a wheat penny dated 1917. I thought that was pretty neat. Would have been neater if it was a whole bag of money but cool nonetheless. Was also digging a post hole by their house and the breaking bar went down a foot or more and after breaking a little more dirt away I found a room. I was pretty jacked because all sorts of crazy thoughts were going through my mind. Well it turned out to be an old celler or something that was full of rocks.

What kinds of things have you guys found?

 

[RivennHewn]

Found an urn full of ashes in a wall.

Told the new home owner, she just said "put it back where you found it and leave it alone".

Covered it up with the new drywall.

 

[RagTopTA]

My kidos mom has g parents that live way up in the mountains in Colorado. There's a spring that runs down the mountains, its been there for a VERY long time. Theres silt banks on both sides about 5-6 high. I found out there was indians living there at some point in the past. I spent most of one day out there looking for arrowheads. I dug several really good ones out of the ground with my own hands. Very cool feeling to find one and think, who was the last person to hold this that's been buried way up in the mountains like this. Ill post a pic of the best ones if anyone is interested.

 

[bigcreek]

Absolutely, put up a pic. I know the feeling. We disced a field by our house and afterwards I was walking across it and found an arrowhead and thought the same thing. My father in law has a ranch and they have found tons of arrowheads and big spear points and bowls and such Really neat stuff. Same father in law was plowing and dug up a 22 s&w pistol in a holster. Another guy I know plowed up a cannonball in an area where the calvary supposedly had wars with the Indians long ago. It wasn't as big as Id imagine a cannonball to be but it was heavy!

 

[MushCreek]

Our area was known as a hold-out for moonshiners, and we've found lots of evidence of such activity on our rural property. Glass jugs, old car parts, a sturdy platform in the middle of the woods that may have been for a still, and we've found large blobs of lead or solder on the ground. Either someone was doing a lot of soldering, or the puddle collected when the revenuers burned the still.

 

[Big Bad Dad]

I was cleaning out the house left when my Aunt and Uncle passed away. There was an electric "fireplace", and I noticed the wooden mantle on top was loose and moved easily. Out of curiosity, I picked it up and looked under it. Found a long, and very dusty, gun case. It was a nice Winchester Model 12!
It didn't stay in there...

 

[maxpower_hd]

My house was originally a cottage. I went up into the attic/crawl space to do some insulation. The front 10' of my house was a porch at one time. So there is a wall with a hole cut in it to get from one side to the other. This was the area where there wasn't insulation. On that wall are some newspapers from 1929. There were articles apparently selected for a reason attached to the wall. One of the articles was about prohibition and explained that you should call the authorities if you see your neighbors drinking or acting strange. LOL

I know from other things I have read about the area that our little lake area was once a vacation spot for folks from the city. And they would come out there to make beer and alcohol and also to drink, dance, etc.

I also found a ticket to a casino/dance night at what was once a boathouse, now a local market, under the pine boards in my bedroom. That was dated 1930. There were also several old bottles found when we dug the foundation for the addition.

 

[Sasquatch912]

I suggest getting a metal detector and go around these old homes and also underthem if there is a crawl space. Youll find a lot of things.

 

[Richard Cranium]

My parents had metal detectors, they spent a lot of time looking for old metal stuff.
they both had a coin collection that they had found and several rings.

 

[Bondo]

Ayuh,... One of the coolest finds for myself was at 'bout age 12 or 13,....

That year Dad offered to buy a ride on lawn mower, if I'd help pay for it by doin' other lawns 'round town,.....

Don't remember if it was that year, or abit later but anyways,.....
The backside of our house only had a small strip of ground, before the neighbor's garden started,...
I usually mowed it goin' down the grade, turnin' 'round, 'n goin' forward back up the grade,...
Well, one day I decided to back up the grade, which of course didn't work so well, causin' the rear drive tires to spin the sod off, exposin' the dirt below,....
I heard a "Click", looked down at the mower deck, 'n saw a round something or other,....
Picked it up, noted it was metal, 'n stuffed it into my pocket,.....

Of course later on, I pulled it out, 'n tried cleanin' it up to see what it was,....
After much scrubbin'(gently to not abuse it), it turned out to be an 1838 1 cent piece,....

Looks to be a fine or very fine grade, worth from $30. to just under $100. in today's google search,....

 

[kbs2244]

I owned in a large lake front house that, as I lived there, I found had a pretty checkered history.
Originally built by the Coroner of Cook Co (Chicago) at the start of prohibition.
He died and it changed hands.
It became a speak easy and ***** house.
(It had 5 upstairs bed rooms and I always wondered why the doors had holes for deadbolts in them.)

My wife has a garage sale one weekend and an older couple came.
The husband just sat in a chair and looked at the house.
I asked him if I could tell him anything about it.
He said he could probably tell me things about it.

He was the one that told me it was a ***** house.
He visited it every weekend with his dad when he was home from collage for the summer.
There was a downstairs bedroom with a 2 inch and two 1 inch holes in the floor right in the middle of the room.
He told me those were for the plumbing to the bar that was in that room.

The house had an outside entrance to the basement with the stairs running alongside the basement wall.
I wanted a straight in stairway so I dug out the concrete slab at the bottom of the old one.
Instead of pea gravel under the concrete there was 2 inches of broken up brown glass from beer bottles.

The house had a foundation of granite boulders that I needed to fix.
As I removed some of the rocks I came across 2 vertebrae.
That freaked me out until I showed them to a Dr. that had a weekend place across the street.
He said that if it was a man he was pretty big.
His guess was a cow.
Maybe a building crew BBQ?

I lived there 30 years and I am sure there was a lot yet to be learned.

 

[Sasquatch912]

I owned in a large lake front house that, as I lived there, I found had a pretty checkered history.
Originally built by the Coroner of Cook Co (Chicago) at the start of prohibition.
He died and it changed hands.
It became a speak easy and ***** house.
(It had 5 upstairs bed rooms and I always wondered why the doors had holes for deadbolts in them.)

My wife has a garage sale one weekend and an older couple came.
The husband just sat in a chair and looked at the house.
I asked him if I could tell him anything about it.
He said he could probably tell me things about it.

He was the one that told me it was a ***** house.
He visited it every weekend with his dad when he was home from collage for the summer.
There was a downstairs bedroom with a 2 inch and two 1 inch holes in the floor right in the middle of the room.
He told me those were for the plumbing to the bar that was in that room.

The house had an outside entrance to the basement with the stairs running alongside the basement wall.
I wanted a straight in stairway so I dug out the concrete slab at the bottom of the old one.
Instead of pea gravel under the concrete there was 2 inches of broken up brown glass from beer bottles.

The house had a foundation of granite boulders that I needed to fix.
As I removed some of the rocks I came across 2 vertebrae.
That freaked me out until I showed them to a Dr. that had a weekend place across the street.
He said that if it was a man he was pretty big.
His guess was a cow.
Maybe a building crew BBQ?

I lived there 30 years and I am sure there was a lot yet to be learned.

You more than likely have 100 yr old "stains" everywhere since it was a ***** house.

 

[LS6 Tommy]

I found a German Mauser above my cousin's A/C duct in his basement...

 

[kbs2244]

One thing I learned from a long retired county deputy was that, before his day, some of the guys would take their bribes in "trade," others in booze, and a few in cash.

I for got to mention, the house was basicly 40 feet by 40 feet square with a basement under only half. There was a crawl space under the other half with the living room and dining room above. Almost dead center under the living room floor was a 4 foot wide oak tree stump with the floor joists coming out from it like spokes. Instead of cutting it out, they used it as part of the foundation.

 

[555]

We have an old house in Arkansas that was built in 1863. The original house was one room and has been added on several times. Some of the things we've found include an 1880 Indian Head penny, a lot of old bottles and jars and recently we found sheet music and magazine pages from 1940 apparently used as wall insulation.

 

[landlord30]

I found a German Mauser above my cousin's A/C duct in his basement...

That is a nice find! Still have it?

 

[mygarageone]

At my childhood home in AuTrain mi , we found an Indian arrow head . After some research they had determine there once was an Indian encampment there .
That arrow head is now in a museum.

 

[DpSyChO]

When I done HVAC I got caught up with service calls one day and went to help installers put system in a rental house. The guy we were doing the install for was regular customer, he would buy cheap houses (think foreclosed crack houses) do minimum to make them rental ready and rent them out. He did get one a little nicer house from a older lady that had gone to nursing home and her house was being sold by the nursing home to pay the bill as her kids lived far off and didnt have interest in the house or her for that matter. The system in the house had the outdoor unit stole during the time no one lived there so the new owner had to get a system before renting it out. The basement was dug out on half the basement you could stand up in and the other half was just crawspace. Behind the wall that seperated the crawspace portion we found a printer paper size box of half gallon jars of shine, completely covered with layer of dust that you could tell had been there for many years. When we left for the day one of the installers, an older fellow that you knew would drink heavy on the weekends, said he had to go to the store before heading back to the shop and told the other installer to ride back with me in my service van because he had to pick up a few things in the install van. This was on a Thursday.......... I dint go back the next day but the guy that rode back with me ......said the box of shine was gone on Friday morning, the homeowner had not been there during this time. The install van driver didnt show up to work Monday and was pretty ill on Tuesday when he showed up late.

 

[AirJunky]

For about 12 yrs now we have lived in a neighborhood that shares a 300' x 100' sandy beach on the shores of the lake. Before us the property was part of a small resort with vacation cabins & boat rentals that date back almost 100 years. I can't begin to count how many times I've found old beer can pull tabs from the 1960s & 70s in the sand. You would think that eventually they would be cleaned up. I found 2 this last summer. Go figure.

 

[ssdave]

I just did a demo to the studs of a small house so that I could redo it and add on. I hoped to find something cool, but only found two 1940's wheat cents. one was worth about $3 when I looked it up.

When I was a kid my dad did house moving and demo's. A guy that worked with us found a $10 gold piece behind a baseboard once. I've always looked carefully when removing baseboards since then!

 

[LXCam]

In 84/85 I was the electrical foreskin on a red iron manufacturing plant at the base of cajon pass (San bernardino steel for you locals). When we were excavating the primary service feed (1500') we unearthed all kids of old bottles, jars and ****. We ended up spending a couple afternoons with the hoe and unearthed several intact coke bottles and a few really cool Old Spice porcelain bottles. But the coolest thing we found were all kinds of morphine glass capulates in deteriated gauze wrapping. Being a bunch of druggies back then we put a lot of thought into seeing if the **** was any good still but we chickened out. Turns out this was the dump for the WWII Japanese internment camp. I had no idea one of those existed out here until we did some research.

 

[bigcreek]

Some of these stories brought back others to my recollection. My dad worked in the newspaper industry most of his working life and in the basement of the Emmett, ID newspaper place he came across a human skull. It seems like the name of the paper was the Independent Enterprise. He brought it home to show us when I was 10 years old (I am 38 now) and I wanted to take it to school for show and tell but of course my parents wouldn't let me. It actually had a strip of muscle on the jaw. My dad ended up taking it to the crime lab in Ontario, OR and they took it and ended up telling him it was an indian skull. Come to find out the story my dad got was someone had found it on Squaw Butte (by Emmett) in the 60's it seems like and it somehow ended up in the basement of the newspaper only to be uncovered years later.

 

[bigcreek]

My mom tells me here aunt and uncle didn't trust banks at all and had a decent amount of money stashed away in jars. They would give some notes to family members sometimes for whatever and my mom recollects it was musty smelling every time. They passed away but never told anyone where their stash was hid. My mom said some in the family searched for it but never did find it. Their place is no longer in the family but maybe some lucky sucker will run across it someday. Another cool story is I have a friend in eastern Idaho that farms. A number of years ago they were putting in a mainline to a pivot and were digging trench past an old homestead on their place with the hoe when they dug up 6 Winchester lever action rifles. All the wood was gone, just the metal. But we always wondered why those were buried in the ground. Who knows.

 

[gungatim]

rental house I rehabbed, found a dorito's bag full of .32 ammo in the ceiling. been there since the early 80's based on the package design. no gun though.

large round tall Edison battery in the wall of another old house, '20's vintage. it's in my antique collection so i'll try to get a pic.

attic of barn I tore down: cremains, female mannequin head, polio brace, and other toys/oddities...pics attached.

 

[Sasquatch912]

rental house I rehabbed, found a dorito's bag full of .32 ammo in the ceiling. been there since the early 80's based on the package design. no gun though.

large round tall Edison battery in the wall of another old house, '20's vintage. it's in my antique collection so i'll try to get a pic.

attic of barn I tore down: cremains, female mannequin head, polio brace, and other toys/oddities...pics attached.

That mannequin has a wandering eye.

 

[Sasquatch912]

In 84/85 I was the electrical foreskin on a red iron manufacturing plant at the base of cajon pass (San bernardino steel for you locals). When we were excavating the primary service feed (1500') we unearthed all kids of old bottles, jars and ****. We ended up spending a couple afternoons with the hoe and unearthed several intact coke bottles and a few really cool Old Spice porcelain bottles. But the coolest thing we found were all kinds of morphine glass capulates in deteriated gauze wrapping. Being a bunch of druggies back then we put a lot of thought into seeing if the **** was any good still but we chickened out. Turns out this was the dump for the WWII Japanese internment camp. I had no idea one of those existed out here until we did some research.

Yeah japanese camps and german pow camps on the east coast

 

[bulletpruf]

In 84/85 I was the electrical foreskin

I'm assuming that's a typo. If not, that sure sounds painful.

 

[ghlkal]

What kinds of things have you guys found?

OP, great thread. I enjoy reading these interesting "finds"

 

[LXCam]

I'm assuming that's a typo. If not, that sure sounds painful.

Hey at least speel check got it close this time. Normally it has me blowing a donkey or fornicating small hoved animals.

 

[theoldwizard1]

A friend bought an older house that had been added on to. The original house was built on a full basement, but the addition was on a crawl space. One of the original basement windows led under the crawl space.

For some reason they had to go into the crawl space but only head and shoulder. Off to the side they saw some disturbed soil and moved it around. Under it were several mason jars with money, a couple of thousand dollars. Some were silver certificates. None were new, but most were in very good condition. They new the previous owners had bought the house in the 70s-80s and the money was too old to be theirs. They figured it was from who ever put the addition on in the 50s.

After some thought, they kept it and sold the silver certificates to a collector.

 

[gungatim]

That mannequin has a wandering eye.

I know. she's cute though. I added a long red haired wig and a fake upper torso with a 50's letterman sweater I found in the house. She has a name and sits on a stool in my shop. she's often easier to talk to than my wife, but she thinks it's funny...sometimes i'll put a drink in her hand and reposition her just for fun...freaks people out when they first walk in.

 

[Shootinok]

years ago I was helping demo and old house. Now days there'd just use an excavator and tear it down in a day. I found an old Saturday Evening Post complete and in tact from the 50's. It was probably read on a break then stuck in a wall by a workman. Then plastered over for the next few decades. Inside it there was a calendar with Marilyn Monroe in a silver swimsuit sitting by a fishing net.
Folded it and put it in my pocket. I brought it to my father as he was a big fan in their day. He had it framed. When later appraised we learned that if it hadn't been folded it could have been very valuable.


Another find -
Helping a friend move, I went in the attic and brought down several boxes he had stored up there. I looked around with a flashlight to make sure nothing was missed and spotted 1 more box way back in a corner. I retrieved it with a little contortions and was surprised to see it was an H&R .32 revolver and a bunch of loose ammo. When I got down I asked him if he'd prefer to keep it in the cab rather than stick it in the back of a moving truck. He - looked up and said "I've never seen that before. Where'd it come from?" Score for him - not me

 

[colt zantop]

I remember when my parents had their house built, they were digging the foundation and found a horse skeleton. I was in awe at the size of the jaw bone with all the teeth...hahaha

 

[Zeke]

I was cleaning out the house left when my Aunt and Uncle passed away. There was an electric "fireplace", and I noticed the wooden mantle on top was loose and moved easily. Out of curiosity, I picked it up and looked under it. Found a long, and very dusty, gun case. It was a nice Winchester Model 12!
It didn't stay in there...

I had a similar experience but it was a rat skeleton instead.

 

[Bronson]

When I was about 12, a neighbor was dredging the creek behind his house.
I was running up and down the loose piles of dirt with my dog and I spied something in the dirt. My first thought was it looked like an elbow of a doll sticking up out of the dirt.
I picked it up and cleaned it off and it was the bowl of an Indian pipe. It was soapstone and very nicely made. At some point , someone had scratched diamond shaped designs in the front of it. One of the neighbors was Professor at the local College. I showed it to him, and the next day he had his whole class down there digging , looking for artifacts. That was the only piece found.
A couple of years ago, I gave the pipe to the guy who was dredging the creek, as he is still a neighbor, and also My Dentist.

 

[Silverton34]

I was in Moab, UT three years ago Jeeping with friends. One day in the middle of nowhere we were sitting on some rocks having lunch when I noticed something round in the crevice of some rocks. I dug it out with a stick and it was a 1799 silver dollar in near perfect condition after mile cleaning. I have been told some interesting values. I would love to know the story of how it got there.

 

[yukon65006]

when I was around 10 found a pistol in a stream about 1/2 mile up a county road off of route 7 along the Ohio River. Was about half eaten away from the water running over it, figured it was there for 30-40 years.

 

[rburke65]

Re wiring old house in the '70s, up in an attic running a seperate circuit for a window air conditioner. Back in the eve end of the roof, trying to fish a wall cavity.....found old 3# coffee cans......yes 48oz. three pound coffee cans! Not the 39oz. three pound cans TA buy today. Cans were full of silver coins....half dollars, quarters, dimes.......surprised they didn't fall right through the lath and plaster. Elderly mother and daughter had no idea the cans were there.

 

[Sasquatch912]

I was in Moab, UT three years ago Jeeping with friends. One day in the middle of nowhere we were sitting on some rocks having lunch when I noticed something round in the crevice of some rocks. I dug it out with a stick and it was a 1799 silver dollar in near perfect condition after mile cleaning. I have been told some interesting values. I would love to know the story of how it got there.

Hard to say.....Id imagine people were slowly moving west until the big massive flow of settlers in the mid 1800s.

 

[Jerriffic]

Chicago Trib article
Published April 17, 2005

LOCKPORT TOWNSHIP -- The house that Andrew Mayes of Lockport recently bought turned out to be a bit like a box of Cracker Jack: It had a surprise inside.

The surprise was secreted behind a wall in a closet Mayes was knocking out while rehabbing the home in the 200 block of Reverend Walton Drive in unincorporated Lockport Township, police said.

There, in an old gunnysack, was a 1928 A1 Thompson submachine gun, a version of the repeating rifle favored by gangsters and G-men alike during the Roaring '20s.

Seven boxes of ammunition were found alongside the "Tommy Gun," which was said to be in pristine condition


J.B.