Who WERE These People Living on Top of a Mountain?

[Music] well hey folks my name is brad martin and if you're new to my videos i hike and explore these mountains of vermont with my metal detector searching for items lost by the pioneers that lived here before me now today i'm hiking to the top of this mountain in search of an old home foundation probably the end of the 1800s possibly the turn of the century it is the middle of march and while there isn't any snow right here we have a ways left to go up and i have a feeling we're going to run into some i'll meet you at the top all right folks well we have arrived to the home foundation it's right over here it's a square hole lined with stones like we usually find up here in the mountains and you know despite it being 50 degrees today still quite a bit of snow up here totally fine i'll probably have wet feet by the end of the day but our metal detector will work just fine through that so the landowner who invited me here today knows the names of the folks that lived here but we do not know what their profession was which is what i'm usually most interested in because it can give us some idea what we might find here since we don't know that we'll use the things we find to try to guess who these people were and uh what they did for a living i'm gonna get my metal detector unpacked see what we can find all right well i found a little area here where there's no snow and this isn't my first target i did find a bunch of shotgun shells before this but this is the first thing that's old and when it first came out i thought for sure it was a big copper coin uh this is a piece of an old lamp this is where the wick would have come up through it would have been a whole big apparatus i mean you can imagine what a lamp looked like it would have had a chimney on top glass chimney and this is a good sign for two reasons uh one obviously people lived here long enough to need light at night and this is a big nice brass target that on the metal detector so if people metal detected here before me this would have been hard to miss so i think that there's a good chance i'm the first one good sign let's see what else we can find all right well i just found something that i found something similar to this didn't know what it was in the moment and then all of you very knowledgeable viewers let me know that it was a a hanging scale you would have put something on a little hook the weight of it would have moved a needle and it would have told you how much it weighed this is very similar to that it has a graduated scale on there down here is a 50 there's a 10 and a zero and then it goes up again i don't seem to remember that hanging scale having a negative section so i'm actually wondering if this is a thermometer there is a jj down here i can't imagine what that would designate it is all folded up and i did unfold it quite a bit there is one last fold up here which i'm going to do carefully at home so we don't lose any of it maybe whatever's on the top here will shine some light on what exactly this is for i'm gonna guess thermometer or possibly another hanging scale but the negative numbers down here doesn't make any sense for a scale kind of cool whatever it is okay well i just got a fairly common artifact here this is what folks in the hobby of metal detecting call a toe tap it's a reinforcement for the front of a leather boot as far as i understand some boots came with them but they could also you know go to the cobbler if you've got a hole in your toe they get to throw one of these on there and it doesn't happen all the time but this one has some text on there and maybe a date let's see well unfortunately i can't make out the last two digits of the 18 date it's the 1800s and i think we'll be able to figure it out we've got a november what 29th something that i learned recently with these patent dates is patents were only filed on tuesdays so if you can't figure out the last two digits of the date hopefully we can figure it out by the month and day uh when that was a tuesday so that's pretty cool 1800s toe tap nice all right so i just got a it was an okay target wasn't getting excited about it i didn't get the camera out to film it it's an awesome find i'm trying to find my toothbrush here so this is a common find this is a pocketknife we find pocket knives up here in the mountains of vermont all the time almost every trip but this one is brass and when their iron when the scales are iron it's nearly impossible to find out who the maker is but this one since it's all brass is in good shape and if you can see right here on both sides there's a name well unfortunately right this moment i cannot make out the first part here but the last part is definitely waterbury which is waterbury connecticut i believe and they made a ton of stuff out of brass mostly buttons apparently pocket knives as well very cool this is not a coin not a piece of jewelry but as far as artifacts go from this time period it's in pretty good shape it's got a name on it we can do some research figure out how old it is exactly and that is an incredible find in my book so cool and you know it's in good enough shape i don't want to uh make promises i can't keep but it almost seems like you could take those rivets out and put a new blade in those scales brass scaled pocketknife waterbury you know it's funny as i make loops around these home foundations i try my best to not metal detect over places i've already been to make the most of my time here the snow is very telling where i've already been and it's absolutely unbelievable how many times i walk the exact same path through the exact same trees with the metal detector so the snow although it's a pain it's good for showing where i've already been so that i can search new places this is also the first time i've done any metal detecting in over three months this winter was brutal we had way too much snow for metal detecting all year so i'm kind of knocking the rust off so far so good though let's keep going see what else we can [Music] find [Music] all right so i got a mid-tone on the metal detector which yeah i thought it was going to be a shotgun show i've been finding a ton of shotgun shells and shell casings today i got the target out and it appears to be a little brass tag this is the back of it ornate and this side i was really hoping that the center here had text but now that we're looking at it together it appears it's just flowers yep just flowers that's too bad i thought for sure that was gonna have text on it so what would this be on would you guess furniture although i don't see any obvious holes for fixing it so i don't know your guess is as good as mine a little brass tag ornamental part of something pretty cool well i just found what i thought was the copper jacket to a bullet and i gave it a rub and it turns out it's not there's text uh it says what i think of what it says is eagle pencil co i don't know if there would have been an eraser i assumed there was and i don't know if it's old or not right now i know it could be from the 1990s or the 1890s for all i know we'll find out though it's kind of cool an old piece of pencil well i'm not finding very many buttons today i did find one tiny little cuff button 1800s flat one and i just found a snap style button i think and it has a logo which i do not recognize uh i at first i thought that it went this way i mean maybe it does but you can see there's like an outer shield design or maybe it does go this way and those are letters is that text is that like ici i'm not sure if you recognize that let me know since it is like a snap style button it might be more modern than uh this site but anything with a logo on it gets me excited because i get to do some research on it alright so i just found an item and i've seen it before somebody actually emailed me with a picture of this thing years ago but i don't remember i don't know what this thing is it's got a very unique shape to it i i feel like the one that this guy sent me had text on it but this one doesn't appear to and i'm fairly certain this was old i remember seeing it and thinking oh that looks modern and then being corrected that it is in fact old so i'm going to do my best to try to figure out once again what this thing is i'm fairly certain this is period with everything else we're finding i just can't for the life of me remember what the heck this thing is anyway moving on so i have just been racking my brain trying to remember what the heck this thing is i definitely knew at one point and i think i probably even have a photo and a record of what this is on my computer at home that's not helping me right now so i took a photo of this and posted it up on instagram already many of you have responded reminding me so thank you instagram community this is a closure for a bottle this end up here would have been surrounded by a cork or maybe even rubber and this whole thing would have been pushed down into a bottle to close it i wish i found this in a bottle because that would be even cooler and maybe i'll have to go search that area some more with just the shovel looking for bottles but for now this is certainly cool enough thank you all of you instagram folks for reminding me and i'll keep my ear out for similar targets maybe there'll be a bottle attached [Music] [Music] all right well i got a surprisingly uh good target here it's like sheet metal all around here but i got a good target and i i haven't really pulled it out of the hole yet but i saw this and i was like i better get the camera out because this looks pretty interesting what is this i think i know do you know i'm not positive but this appears to be the keyhole cover for a padlock so i rubbed it on my pants a little bit i believe what we have here is a little crown and then a g something and then it says patent i believe so yeah i believe this is a uh a padlock keyhole cover it would swing out of the way you could put your key in and you just kept dirt and stuff out of the mechanism cool well i've been digging a lot of junk recently so this is a nice little treat it's going to keep me going for a little bit longer padlock plate super cool well i'm not sure what we have here it appears to be silver plated not solid silver but it is uh it does have a nice little floral pattern here it does appear to be cleaning up pretty well maybe once i get this all completely cleaned up i'll be able to figure out what this is exactly but uh it appears to just be you know a decorative piece that would have gone around a wooden shaft of some kind what it was it will probably never be able to figure it out but who knows use your imagination all right well i can't tell you how many live digs i've done today and they wind up being garbage but this one it was a pretty good target it was like an 80 let me check it again 85 which is good that's like coin range and i got the plug out and it's still an 85 so we're gonna we're gonna check it check it out together here seems like it's still quite a bit deeper right in the middle of my hole i did good digging this one it's a coin it is a coin it is not a big copper it's a small scent definitely a penny but what kind looks like it's going to be an indian head penny i will take that today has been incredibly slow we got a date too 1867 man that's uh just about as old as you can get with an indian head penny it's pretty good shape too 1867. well the day was slow but this seems like a good way to end it i'll check this immediate area you know before i pick up but uh i'm happy with this being the end of the day an old indian headset with a date in good shape beautiful all right folks well i've got all my stuff packed up and we're going to call it a day there's nothing i love more than metal detecting the very earliest colonial homes up here in the mountains but there's something to say about these kind of turn of the century early 1900s places where you never know what you're going to find there's a huge variety of things in the ground and i always learn something new that being said i was hoping we could use these things to determine what their profession might have been and unfortunately i don't think we're going to be able to do that all of this very much came from a home let's take a look at it on refresh our memories well a lot of this stuff didn't actually make it into the video i don't think things like this gear back here i got some just little brass doodads a rivet buckle suspender the rest of this you've seen for the most part i did get a harmonica read plate thermometer or hanging scale at this point i think it is a thermometer this silver ferrule thing which is very decorative i'm thinking now is part of the pencil as these things were pretty much right next to each other the toe tap with the date or the you know the patent date on it patent date doesn't necessarily mean manufacture date but it is a date three kind of flat buttons as well as the button with the logo on it indian head penny keyhole cover for a padlock and uh what i'm calling the coolest find of the day the pocket knife the brass scaled pocket knife with text on it that i'm going to be able to do some research on figure out when those things were made and maybe even put it back into service that blade is going to be shot but who knows maybe we can put something new in there overall a good day you're a hawk in the distance all right well i want to thank you very much for watching i hope you enjoyed and it's like 60 degrees right now this very well might be the last time we see this white stuff until the end of 2021 and uh i hope so it's been a long winter i'm gonna start hiking out see you next week you

Channel: Green Mountain Metal Detecting

Views: 49,996

Rating: 4.9794927 out of 5

Keywords: 2021, best metal detecting finds, ancient discovery, real treasure, best thing found metal detecting, treasure hunter, gmmd, brad martin, old coins, nova constellatio, colonial america, silver, vermont, new england, metal detector, xp deus, garrett, history

Id: vt5mWxGQ4Yg

Length: 18min 16sec (1096 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021