MY GRANNY'S CABIN SAT IN THREE STATES AND THREE COUNTIES WITHOUT MOVING AN INCH. METAL DETECTING

hello folks and welcome to this episode of the appalachian history detectives today's been sort of a field trip for me and bo the aqua trigger will be with me on this dick we are a long ways from home this is my childhood home and right behind me here you're going to see a plaque honoring my fourth great grandfather his name is joshua jones shortly after the revolutionary war he was given a track of land i believe it was around 400 acres for his service in the war and he hailed from bucks county bucks county pennsylvania he was uh there at the battle of trenton his 400 acres is right up this road the detection will not occur on his original homestead it's up here hopefully that'll be another dig for another day it is through him that i am a member of the sons of the american revolution this started my journey into the history detection that i do it was researching my family's history and coming into contact with this patriot ancestor and uh trying to find out where how my patriot how my ancestors ended up here and this is it [Music] oh [Music] the 30s were huguenots who fled france in the late 1600s for austria and later to quebec canada from here in the mid 1700s it would be found in princeton new jersey where my patriot family story in america begins [Music] my patriot grandfathers george fetty and joshua jones are inextricably linked through their service in the revolutionary war george feddy was a member of the new jersey militia and joshua jones was with the berks county pennsylvania militia and both would be linked to the battle of trenton in 1777 under the leadership of george washington it is not entirely known what would bring them both to the western frontier pennsylvania notably greene county during this time in the late 1700s the land they settled was once in greene county pa but during the survey of the mason-dixon line in 1767 greene county was split with land south of it going to the county of monongahela in virginia monongahela county would split in 1842 into marion county virginia and finally in 1863 when 55 virginia counties seeded from virginia to form west virginia as a result of the civil war the family farm had now passed into three states and three counties without moving an inch fetty's grandson john d fetty was my second great grandfather and would build his cabin on land adjoining the jones my great-grandmother minnie would share and relate stories of her childhood being raised in this cabin by her father john and wife arcilla who would read the children's stories from the bible in front of the fireplace my great-grandma would marry sydney jones grandson of the patriot joshua jones who lived and farmed land with the fatties it was here at a young age of 46 that he would see tragedy and die due to an accident involving his team of horses being spooked while raking hay in the field below the cabin in this episode [Music] in this episode i am joined by the aqua as we explore my family's cabin and search for artifacts related to my family stay tuned hello folks welcome to this episode of the appalachian history detectives we are on site and this is my family's farm and it's a big sizable farm and we are coming up to the first log house it's gonna be here on the left and this was a jones house so he was the second or third generation from the revolutionary war patriot and i don't think we're going to be able to get in there on this house so we got a couple houses up here but this one looks like it is not doable right there on the right let me get down here right there on the right was the kitchen the detached kitchen and there was the main part of the house there were stairs that went up to the top there this used to be a gorgeous log house really not even 20 years ago and there was a porch right over there and uh man it is all grown up it never used to be this way but it is this way now the chickens with us so here's the front end of the i don't know if you guys can see in there but that's this was the kitchen here and uh when i was a kid it actually had a wood shingle groove still okay okay we're gonna walk up this road and we're gonna go to my great great grandparents house all right folks we have arrived and this house here goes back at least three generations of my family of great greats and here it is this is it still standing we don't know when it was built so part of the challenge here part of the i guess yeah part of the challenge is i want to date this place uh we know that my great-great-grandma lived here my great-grandma was born here and uh she always told us stories of being educated by the firelight there by the fireplace and her mom would read her from the family bible because that was you know basically her education i'll take you around the house i'll take you inside the house i'm going to show the chick here some places around the house here that uh i know about that she told me about we're going to check those places out too and i would like to find some artifacts that can help period date this house it's dovetail notch tells me it's past 1840 um i think it's actually post civil war that's what i think but i don't know that and hopefully we're going to find that out today right yeah yeah and uh now this land my patriot revolutionary patriot grandfather's property is not very far from here and uh his son grandson and his own great grandson so three generations of my patriot grandfathers lived right here right here on this land so we could find this deer it's not out of the realm of possibility we could find revolutionary war artifacts here or civil war artifacts here or world war one artifacts here we can find all of that here so i'm glad you guys are here on this journey with us i'm glad you're walking these footsteps with us and i hope we have a really great day today we will okay we're going to get started here and i am going to start right here in the front yard this is what was the front yard then so i'm going to detect out here first and i am going to put it on pro zero i'm gonna bump up the iron description because i honestly can already hear a lot of chatter in the ground so i'm gonna put it up to 25 i'm down to one bar on my battery i don't have a lot of battery left but i'm going to use it until they're done i got new batteries so let's just see what okay all right all right there's a 44 50 right there so we're gonna dig that up now i will tell you my uncle and cousins and everybody hunt up here and the reason we're up here this weekend is because opening deer season is actually happened yesterday um turkey season yesterday deer season is coming up we want to get in here before the hunters get in here so we might actually find a lot of rifle shells and shotgun shells but all right there's a midtone let's go ahead we're going to dig that up might be a button right there take a look pull it out whatever it is it's right here let me pull you guys a little closer it's right here pull up here you can see it pull this out of the ground out of that hole the bottom is concave i don't know what that is i don't know if it's remnants from a bullet i believe it's a part of an old rivet but i don't know i uh i think actually i know what this is i think this is piece of lead that was on top of a nail that would go on a roof i think that's what that is this is where the nail head was and they put lead on top of it to keep it from rusting you think that might be what it is yeah i think so all right let's keep going all right might be iron how that is all right let's take a look at that i see it right there it is a 22 shell casing okay i just pulled this out of the ground now it doesn't look let me pull up here it's probably not that old because it's got you know it's got the screw in there look at it and that fancy it's uh it's you know it's a led to a drain caulk or something like that and i am literally on the edge of the house so right here is the house and i haven't been showing you but what i've been finding mostly is mason jar lids so i just stuck them right there uh this so far is one of the only non-ferrous items i found so far so found this hole and there's probably more in here come right here against the house and i got a good hit right there it's a 67 so it could be a rifle shell don't know it's back i think probably a piece of china right here little piece of china maybe a little bowl you see the curvature right there but there's something in here let's see what that is it's a button or a coin oh this is a great find it is a button or a coin i think it's a coin yeah i found a coin it is a wheat cent right there see it says one cent right there let me pull up here it says one cent let's see if i can get a date on this thing oh it's it's it's chewy it is right in here it's a brass buckle kind of how it is i mean it's got a iron pin but it's brass nonetheless that's a nice little fine man yeah yeah i'll take it awesome yeah i'll take it but it sounded good too yeah it sounded real good i'll rather dig these in bullets we're gonna walk around a little bit let you see now this was always the bad part here because there is a door that goes in and there was a window there and that window unfortunately you can see the upstairs rafters i'll take you in there it is safe they've got it propped up so many memories here for me as a child and so many stories that i heard about this place [Music] so [Music] and my great-grandma said that she would sit her her mother would be my great-great-grandmother would sit there in a rocking chair and rock and read them the family bible as they sat around the fire right here all right i pulled this out of this hole and i'm actually excited to find this of course you can see it's broke it's been binged banged up and dinged on and everything else but wow look at that and this no doubt my mind my grandpa my great-grandpa or my great-great-grandpa has used this and uh it's right off the porch here right off the porch so they probably use this for kindling wood for their fireplace oh that's awesome isn't that awesome oh man that is awesome i'm really happy about that that's an artifact and that's an artifact associated with my family all right let's keep going all right mr aqua trigger you can tell me what this is i know it's probably to a pan but it fills copper and it is copper you can see the copper right there that's a different kind of handle on it this is a big piece of copper and there's some rivets right there copper bucket copper bucket offer bucket yeah good signal great signal yeah yeah absolutely that's kind of cool a lot of times you just find this part here you know which has a big copper uh proper bucket or a pail you know just the middle and it's kind of valuable so you don't normally find it because people wouldn't you know would keep it yeah it's pretty it's got the patina all over it um it's gonna look good on your wall in your house main room as soon as you walk in i can i can tell you my wife would look at that and she'd be like what is that from what are you planning on doing i'm gonna throw it right it's actually pretty cool i like it man hey might have been full of gold coins so look around there for me it's it's my grandparents and my great-grandparents i mean they held this stuff they did so it's not just someone else's story it's my story so on your wall just like that little hatchet is oh that's odd it's melted lead that is melted lead i have no idea what it went to but that's what that is melted lead all right yeah outside you guys see it see it in there i don't see it there's a mason jar lid is that it yep that's reading an 82 i don't know what that is so we'll uh we'll put it in the bag and we'll keep going but it might be this might be a piece of big piece of lead okay it is in this hole right here oh we got a coin we got a coin maybe we got oh coin it's crusty i don't know how it is it looks like a quarter that's a washington um yeah i can't see a date on that but i don't think it's that old as you can see the eagle on the back i'll clean that up let's see what year that is all right the aqua trigger now we're talking on our little lunch break here and uh bo and i actually bo made some observations and he brought to my attention and i agree with him and i want to show you some things that we have observed and uh now i know for a fact my great grandma and my great great grandparents lived in this house the question has always been when was it built and we think the cabin is actually repurposed from an older or earlier or another building in another cabin and i'll show you why see how this sticks out further than the edge right there it sticks out further and look at this this this is kind of sloppy work i mean look how wide this is this this here notch was cut for a wider log and uh that you would never see that kind of craftsmanship on a log that was originally cut and you can see here same kind of deal see how this is how wide this is in uh there all up through there i also wanted to point out if you guys can see this is the logs from the second level down are different kind of log we think these are i believe are poplar those are poplar and when you get up above it's a different kind of log and the chinking and everything is completely different up there and you can really get to notice it right over here i'll bring you guys right over here okay okay now you can see it see you see these bands of logs up there see how dark they are and look at these logs and what bo says is look these are smoother they're dressed better and as you go up it looks like it's dressed less and they were in a hurry and uh i told though that maybe when they were putting this cabin in they were fighting the weather and they were trying to get it up before winter set in and so being in a hurry they were slapping this thing up and by the time they got to the top they did not put the quality in the upper logs that they put in the lower logs also another interesting observation we made is the chimney the stone chimney is not on the outside the chimney's on the inside and i've honestly have never observed that on a cabin unless it was a two-sided cabin and it was an interior chimney when you had two sides to it but this is not a two-sided cabin this is this was made this way and you can clearly see the logs down below are of a different time period or a different kind of logs i mean these are this first level is a poplar this is poplar and that up there is probably red oak it's my guess but you can see even though it's higher and it should be out of the elements like the bottom logs are that up there looks like it's not weathering as well i want that isn't that interesting and also i thought it was kind of interesting that they would dress up the openings like this do you see the trim work around the openings the door you know in the window you know why would they do that that that's post 1880s because that's dressed lumber there and uh i think this cabin actually post dates 1880. um my great-grandma was born in 1895 i was told that she was a baby up here her husband sydney was born in 1875. he lived down this valley he was 46 years old when he got killed and he was raking hay and his team the horses were uh was in front of them and they got spooked and they rare back and they threw him back into the tines of the hay rake and when he didn't come home for dinner my grandma went out to look for him and she found him tied up in that hay rick and he was already dead and she was only 20 i think she was 26 years old when that happened so she was a widow with two young girls my grandma and my great aunt and so my great-grandma her mother was a single mother until she remarried when she was 30 years old and uh and it was down here right down here is where he was killed and my great aunt who still lives up here told me that many many times they saw a ghost down here in this valley and like all goes you hear the lady in white the lady in white dress but my aunt my great aunt swears that they have seen a ghost down here of a lady coming down the valley in a white dress did that spook the horses i don't know they don't know what happened they don't know if it was snakes or yellow jackets or bees or what but something happened to spook those horses and it killed my great grandpa and now you know the rest of the story okay we're going to call it the day here at the house we're going to walk on down the valley here to the other homesteads i didn't do real well here i'm a little disappointed actually i'm i'm pretty pretty disappointed about it i had high hopes for this place and i know my family are probably not going to be very happy either that we could not find anything to date this cabin or of any kind of spectacular font but everything i dug i believe i've already showed you and we're going to walk over there and show you what chick has found what i have is i have a rivet here i have two coins here this is a 1914 wheat cent i believe this quarter here is a 1969 25 cent piece here's a buckle i can't tell you how old any of this stuff is this is all melted lead here and uh of course you have this piece here i don't know what that was two or four but it looked like it screwed into something and then this well-used hatchet head got a lot of trash i wanted to show you guys i didn't show you that dig but look at that that's the end of an old dart and that just shows you got to be very very careful when you're sticking your hand in a hole and you're digging it out you get caught by that and that could do some serious damage and of course this copper looks like a copper kettle is what that was maybe uh for uh making applesauce all right that's what i found didn't find a whole lot didn't find a lot of great stuff but everything i found at this site at one time belonged to my family it had been great if we found some buttons and buckles but i did find a buckle and i did find some coins so i never got skunked all right let's go over there and let's take a look at what the chickens found all right we're kind of in the dark here because put everything in here so the aqua trigger he came in here and he started digging around digging around right over here you can see he's got a silver buckle here a lot of square nails and a lot of junky junky junkie hey so what's that junk the buckle well i got yeah it does you know yes and it's all square nails you don't see a lot of i don't see any ground now that's kind of interesting i don't know what that is okay so so i said 1880 based upon what we've observed from this house what's your guess sure yeah i'd go with that go with that [Music] you

Channel: Appalachian History Detectives

Views: 26,119

Rating: 4.9375 out of 5

Keywords: Appalachian history detectives, aquachigger, beau Ouimette, Appalachian history, history hunters, West Virginia pioneers, metal detecting, aqua chigger metal detecting, aquachigger metal detecting, adventure, West Virginia

Id: -Et0wpme_AU

Length: 33min 0sec (1980 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021