Any Other Treasure Hunters / Metal Detectorists Out There?

My daughter bought metal detectors when she was still living here, and she and I went out into the old areas along the Tennessee River and searched, but never found anything really great, although we did have a lot of fun searching.
When I was growing up, my mom had a metal detector and I remember her going around our yard and the old store yard next door. She also had a fluorescent light kind of flashlight, and when we went camping at some lake or river, we went out at night and hunted for the rocks that would fluoresce.
It was a lot of fun !

 

I bought a detecctor years ago and took it to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. There's been 2,000 to 3,000 shipwrecks off of those shores, and every once in a while strong storms will bring stuff in from the bottom. The only thing I found that week was a hand-hammered nail from an old ship, which was pretty cool. I recall detecting further up the beach and finding the usual soda can tabs, when my detector went off "differently." I dug down and saw a coin I had never seen before! My heart was pounding!!! I picked it up, turned it over, and there was George Washington. It was one of those stupid state quarters.

People in my region of Virginia find all sorts of Civil War stuff (Grant v Lee, The Battle of Trevilian Station, June 1864), but you need a powerful detector to find stuff that deep. It's a big hobby in Virginia. I've met a couple of guys who have souped-up their machines, but I've never gone detecting with them. Nor have I (or they) detected on my property.

I've been panning my creeks for gold (there used to be a bunch of gold mines in my county), but I'm on the western fringes of where the main vein is said to run...the larger mines are northwest of me by maybe 10 miles (in the town of Mineral and off of Goldmine Road.) There's a sizeable vein that runs all the way through the state (north-to-south) from Maryland into North Carolina. They make specialty detectors that will detect gold, but those are very expensive.

Here are my creeks that are gonna make me rich.

This is near the source of the one creek:

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My neighbors used to draw water from that spring when they were children before the well got dug. They're 70 years old and it's still flowing.

The creek runs along the side boundary of my property and converges into one that I think belongs to someone else (plats are iffy around here):

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This shot is looking back towards the house. You can barely see where my smaller creek (the ditch coming out of the woods off to the right) dumps into this larger one.

The only thing I've found so far is pyrite (fool's gold.) Apparently it can be co-located with gold, but I've not found any of that. The odds of finding anything other than tiny flakes are not very good...but I like hiking down there and picking through the creek bed and the pretty rocks. And I look for arrowheads while I'm at it.

 

The problem is that the reverse of so many of them does not look like a real U.S. coin. At least a pull tab ain't a poser.

 

My daughter often went treasure hunting down along some of the creeks that run through downtown Huntsville and have been there as long as the town has, and she has found some interesting old bottles and stuff like that. In the creek, she didn’t use the metal detector, just turned over rocks and hunted around to see what she could find.