Wonder what you'd find detecting old prisons

No telling what kinda do dads,,,hand made of metal one would find...

I'm a guard a a prison and often think about what might be there. It was established in the mid 1800's so,I would think that there could be some neat stuff. From keys to hand made shanks!

Among the doo dads might find an old coin or two.

Lots of bones.

I have had the chance to do that and have found a lot of cool stuff that I donated for others to see.

LowBoy

TAKE A LITTLE TIME KICKBACK AND WATCH SOME OF MY DETECTING VIDEO'S BELOW ON YouTube

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If you don’t dig it, then how are you going to know what you’re missing!
How can you have your pudding if you don’t eat your meat!

I dug a sterling silver pin from a PA State psych hospital...not sure I would want to advertise that on my lapel all that much.

Old shanks

LowBoy

TAKE A LITTLE TIME KICKBACK AND WATCH SOME OF MY DETECTING VIDEO'S BELOW ON YouTube

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If you don’t dig it, then how are you going to know what you’re missing!
How can you have your pudding if you don’t eat your meat!

Years ago I detected the inner courtyard of a historic jail. Found a full set of jailer's keys, probably from the 1970s.

Buttons with insignia from staff uniforms ?

There was an article many years ago (early or mid 1980s?) in one of the treasure magazines. A guy who was a prison guard submitted an article that got accepted and put into one of the TH'r magazines of the era. He tells of how .... his co-workers, knowing his hobby was md'ing, had asked him to bring his detector to work and help them out. They were looking for suspected knife they thought had been hidden/buried in the grass in the prison yard.

That turned in to a full search, where he was given carte-blanche to continue searching the whole yard, to likewise see if other contraband was also to be uncovered. I don't recall if the prison he was hunting was historic or old or not. The author lists all the stuff he found. Yes, he found stuff they suspected was metal fashioned into knife-like weapons. And yes the article showed a few coins he found (I think just clad). And I recall some pix showed simple junk. Like aluminum can fragments (that you'd expect from lawnmower slaw), random slag junk, etc... Didn't seem too exciting to me.

We have a couple of detectors at work that they use every year to search the outside rec yard before letting inmates in it for the summer. I will see if they will let me do the detecting in the spring. May be kinda fun!

I remember back in the early 1990's, I was visiting a brother-in-law in Abilene, Tx. and we went to a State park near there and as we stopped at the entry gate, we asked the girl working the gate if it would be ok if we metal detected there, and she said, "I don't see why not" so we paid the small fee to go in and started detecting. We spent a good hour or so, not finding much, but I had noticed an old jail cell, that was an historical monument, but was saving the best for last, so after wasting about 1 1/2 hours, I headed over and started detecting around it and out started popping one after another old coins, lots of silvers. My brother-in-law saw me finding coins and he joined in. We must have found 30-40 old coins, with most of them being silver. After we had been there another hour or two, a park ranger came over and sternly asked what we were doing? We said we were metal detecting and said that the girl at the front gate gave us permission. Well, he said, metal detecting was not allowed at Texas State parks, and that he could confiscate our detectors and that we had to leave. We said ok, but on the way back to our car, found a couple of other silvers. It sure would be nice to go back to Texas and detect around that old jail cell. I know we left lots of silver back there.

The town I live in is best known for the August 1946 "Battle of Athens". While the GIs were gone off fighting WW2, the local politicians had been rigging elections. Particularly the sheriff ballots. When the GIs came back home, they had the August election and found out that one had been rigged too. The GIs stormed the national guard armory and marched to the jail and got into a big shootout with the corrupt sheriff and his minions. It made national headlines. Anyway, that was at what we call the old jail....it is not there anymore. But has been made into a park down town. I've not detected it yet. The park is very small but it also encompasses the ground where the gallows used to be for hangings....just a block over from the county court house and the "old jail" was at one time the new jail....the one before it also sat in the same place. You guys have me wondering if its worth checking out now. I imagine there is probably a lot of spent WW2 era bullets and casings there from that shootout.

I'd take a look Daniel,,you never know.-- might find an old badge or two.

One of the reasons I started this post,,,,is to get folks to thinking.

Sometimes the obvious gets overlooked.

And while it's cold,,,nothing like thinking things over.

I've mention this here before,,,I am going to be detecting an aircraft crash site,,,happened by in 1936 I beleive. Landowner has been real friendly with me. He has a couple original newspaper articles about the crash. Will post them along with the finds.

He and I are going to try to get some things hopefully to take to the county historical society from the site,,,,that is if I can find anything. The locals pounced on it looking with their eyeballs for whatever they could find of value,,,,,,my mother in laws first husband,,got the tailpipe muffler off the plane (it got stolen) ,,but the airplane did top some trees when it went down,,so debris field likely wide.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 01/08/2017 09:24PM by tnsharpshooter.