Near Attelboro some friends and I once found the woods full of silver bars!

I saw the word Attleboro in the post below - and couldn't help but be reminded of the biggest treasure recovery I will ever be involved in.

It was The summer of 1967 - the summer before I went off to USAF pilot training. I had a summer job at Englehart industries in South Attleboro Massachusetts. We manufactured the big rolls of three layer clad sandwich which went to the US mint for stamping out clad 50 Cent pieces. The raw materials of course were ingots of silver and copper. The silver came from the US repository at West Point. It was shipped in tractor-trailers, the bars on wooden pallets - one deep on the floor of the trailer. One morning when shift started at seven - all us young guys were rounded up and we drove out to a spot near the factory where the cops had cordoned off an area where one of the tractor-trailers had run off the road into the woods and spilled its load of silver ingots pretty much everywhere. It took a couple of hours to round them all up – and you can imagine that nobody was allowed to leave until they all have been found and accounted for.

Rick Kempf
Gold Canyon AZ- where there is no gold



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/21/2017 02:56PM by lytle78.

Nice story Rick!!

Was they all accounted for???LOL

Might ought to swing that spot sometime..

Keith

“I don't care that they stole my idea . . I care that they don't have any of their own”
-Nikola Tesla

Ha! good story. What did you fly back then?

I ended up in KC-135's. Nice airplane, boring job. I got out when my commitment was up and tried being a hippie, but my hair let me down - had to go off and work for a living. Ended up in Norway, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman and spells in the US in between - purchasing and contracts administration in the oil and aerospace/military support economy. Now retired in Arizona.

Another Englehard silver story. One of the other "summer kids" at the plant was majoring in chemistry at a nearby college - he ended up working in the lab of course, not out in the dirty and dangerous factory floor. They had to do analysis in the incoming metals, to ensure the "mix" of silver and copper - 80/20 for the outsides - 20/80 for the core (if I remember correctly).

Us summer help unloaded all the incoming silver by hand - quicker than using forklifts inside the trailers. One shipment was unusual. Mostly the bars (bread loaf sized) only had stamps from the US repository at West Point. One lot of bars - however had 4 stamps - in reverse ofder of time, they were - West Point, Rothschild's Bank London, Rothschild's Bank Paris - and an eagle and swastika stamp!

The next day at lunch my buddy from the lab told me that the analysis for the silver was weird. Later he told me what was messing it up - traces of mercury - some of the silver was likely from dental work - kind of ruined my lunch.

Rick Kempf
Gold Canyon AZ- where there is no gold

That's a lot of teeth.....Yea, that would ruin lunch for me also. Seems like we're coming back to full swing....the world is going insane, again.