Video of a Civil War Roadbed dig in VA

Found this while searching for some info on civil war camp digs - just thought I'd share with everyone as I found it to be very interesting.

Hope you'all do too

HH

Video>> [www.youtube.com]

That was cool. Thanks. Makes me wonder who much stuff I walk over every time I go detecting. I have found many bullets and coins right on the edge of detection with the Etrac. I know there are a lot I can't even hear.....;o(

Those targets were DEEP!

Those were some nice relics though I thought they would have found more with all that excavating.

NASA-Tom Wrote:
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> Those targets were DEEP!

Yeah - makes you want to rent a backhoe and/or a dozer and remove about 3ft of earth in some places!

I remember when they removed the 1st 8 or 10 inches of top soil in the oldest park in town (my home town) to completely redesign/re-landscape it back in the early 80s - it's a huge park like 1/2 mile long and was dedicated a park at the time the city became registered as a city in 1831 but it was used as a park for many yrs before then

needless to say - dozens of guys showed up with detectors as word spread that we were finding seated coinage all over the park and it turned almost into an all out brawl down there as many guys were fighting over "claimed" areas of ground - there was a big write up in the local news paper and everything! I've never seen anything like it since then but I hear it can get that way out on the east coast after a storm/hurricane blows thru!

Aaron Wrote:
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> Those were some nice relics though I thought they
> would have found more with all that excavating.


There was lots of great relics dug in previous hunts On this site and the surrounding area. As I remembr we had approx. 40 acres to hunt on. What your seeing in Aaron's post is actuallydirt that was under a few feet of dirt when we first hunted this land. This was very good soil not the nasty red stuff up in N. VA. The detectors most used on this site was Whites, Shadow X5 and nautilus. My choice was my Shadow X5 and it served me well. Still have my X5 with all 4 coils. The name of this site is. stonemans Switch if anyone would like to see pictures of the camp taken during the war.

ArtWI

And just down the road from me. Thanks for sharing.

Randy

Did that road bed sink that far or was it constructed in a sunken road that was later filled-in?

Cool video! Reminds me of an excavation we had in Oakland 10 years ago. We had up to a 100 bottle diggers at a time. Even Dana Carvey from SNL showed up! I'll try to post some pics someday. it was insane.

Many cool pics here:

[www.picturetrail.com]

Be sure to hit the "Prev" and "Next" buttons.

It appears as though many of the bottles were dug alone, like the guy found them using a glass detector!

Looks like some of the bottles, tracks, and finds were down at least a meter or more. If that was level ground in an open field in 1860 how did so much dirt get placed above it?

I see what you mean go-reb, It's like they dug at a specific spot for a bottle. Nice bottles and artifacts, I must say.

You can see sections of this on display at the White Oak museum in Fredericksburg. They donated part of the logs to the museum as they were in the ground. Very neat display.

Some of those guys are bottle hounds. The only time you see them hunting with detectors is when they are searching for deep iron to signal a potential hut site...hopefully filled with the camp drunk's bottles. Some will make you sick...I watched one guy at Coles Hill at a DIV, that took his shovel and threw it into the air...and dug a hole where it landed, and pulled out an intact 1860s whiskey bottle from that hole. I had been up there within feet of that, hoping to dig a bottle...digging for 2 days straight for 10 hrs a day...and all I had found was broken glass and cattle bones. I've yet to find an intact one. There are guys that will spend every DIV trying to find bottles...and some are extremely good at it. I found out I was better surface hunting with detectors...at least I filled my display cases that way.

The shoes were the best. How did the road get so deep?

ShovelNose Wrote:
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> The shoes were the best. How did the road get so
> deep?

I don't have the answer to that question but I'd like to know too!

It's almost as if it were in a low lying area on a road/trail and they used the logs as a "fill" over what may have been swampy ground at the time so they could move their wagons/equipment along the way and then at some point it was just filled in/over as time went on and road construction improved? That's all I can think happened! If you look at it - the old roadbed is now in a field and the actual road used today is off to the left.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/04/2013 11:08PM by MichiganRelicHunter.

That was a great video!!!! It is amazing how much sediment (I guess) settled over 160 years!!!! I read the comments. All of them were positive, but one person's was deleted because it got too many negative votes. If you click on his youtube name (the negative commenter) you can read what he wrote. He said: "Effing pothunters!!! Thieves!!!" and evidently he made reference to archaeologist or something due to the nature of the comments made back to him. I sure wish that there was a way for the archaeologist and the metal detectorists to get along in the same world. Most of us have the same goal. We don't do it to make cash. We have a small museum in my small town of Savannah Tennessee called River City Museum. I am going to loan my finds to them at some point. We have large paddlewheeler cruise boats that come up/down the river and stop at Savannah and everyone disembarks and goes to either the Cherry Mansion (Ulysses Grant's headquarters during Battle of Shiloh) or they go to the museum. They would might find my finds (and other's finds) interesting. Savannah is rapidly expanding. Parking lots are already over two spots that I have hunted and found CW relics. If I left any, and I'm sure that I did, they are forever covered up now. I have the ones I found in a plaque. The archaeologist don't have any. I wish that we could work together and there wasn't such a chasm betwixt us.
Thanks for sharing that video. I could feel their excitement!!!!

*** How did the road get so deep? ****

Did some research looking for answers. Got the same results at each site, so it must be true:

1. Purposefully buried artifacts
2. Vegetative sediments from plant decomposition (humus or peat)
3. Burial of sediments by gravity (colluviation) on slopes
4. Flood deposits (alluvial)
5. Wind carried deposits (aeolian)
6. Human activity rubbish piles (middens) in occupation areas
7. Man-made building and re-building projects

Don't know the history of that site but whatever was the cause(s) it is likely a combination of 1-7 above.

Very cool vid. The shoes leave you thinking.

They built those corduroy roads a lot in winter camps. There are several reasons for them...the biggest was to keep out of the mud. The winter time is notorious for being rainy in the south, and the troops were often hunkered down in one spot for several months. When you have thousands of human and animal foot traffic in one spot, every day, it don't take long to make a mess. To make matters worse, these winter camps were often reused from year to year...due to water sources, and the way they lay out the camps. So it may have been a muddy area to start with. These may not have always been on travel roads like you're probably thinking. They lay their winter camps out with roads between them...and these received a ton of foot traffic. You can see in one of the pics below, of the winter huts they would build...and the cordurory road they have placed in front of the hut areas to keep out of mud...but you also see the wagons travelling that too.

The supply people would often make way for lighter wagons or new materials and just dump out the older ones...especially if they were going far; they often would discard stuff or hide it to keep the enemy from finding it and making use of it. Thus the shoes may have been that way. On another hunt, they dug a bunch of bugles in a trash pit, all side by side. In one of the pics below, you can see how muddy it was...the logs were the only non muddy thing to walk on. If the logs received a lot of heavy wagon traffic...they could have sank into the mud by the weight. Since some of these makeshift dry walking paths were not actual "roads"...the farmers had no use for them in ther fields. So they probably filled them in to reclaim farm land.

Good information daniel love the old pictures

Wood, iron leather and wool. Not much else in those pictures, except mud.
Thanks for the trip back in time Daniel.

There were some rail tracks found not real deep found near the one side of the corderoy road. The corderoy road was deeper by quite a bit and parallel to where I,ve seen pictures of the train tracks with the train on them. I makes sense to me now that the wagons being heavy when loaded with supplies etc. would cause the road to sink and that's why the road was deeper!. The track rails were found the first time we were there and the road was discovered in a later hunt. And it was deep! There were shoes and othe good finds that turned up befor the road as I remember. I was at the hunt but not involved with the deep digging to get to the road as that was left to a crew that were experinced deep diggers like privy diggers etc.

ArtWI

Yes Corduroy roads were very popular/needed in civil war times in boggy area's especially..alot of traffic makes for a quogmire..

Keith