Folks I have been detecting some cellar holes up here in northern Minnesota and having a ball. In fact, last night I just started writing another book about detecting cellar holes and old pioneer homesteads. If you’re interested in metal detecting cellar holes, you’re not alone—I look at these cellar holes as a piece of history. I find it fascinating what you can recover from these old home sites. I swing the Deus 2 and love it and it has paid for itself many times over. It’s a great detector but comes with a larger coil. The last couple trips I used the Nokta Legend with a small coil and was astounded by what I found. Furthermore, I had detected this cellar hole many times. I concentrated my efforts right around the hole itself.
Many of these old homes have burned down and around the site itself is littered with trash and a ton of iron targets.
Now these recoveries don’t look like much but they were pulled from a very small area close to the cellar hole. I had detected it many times. The first day I recovered a homemade wood chisel, a spoon, some buckles, a lantern top and a very ornate piece of glass that was in the hole of another recovery. What amazed me were the shotgun shell caps and the bullet casing. These targets really ring out and everyone could have been a old coin or a piece of jewelry. In fact, they were targets I had missed several times during earlier hunts.
Day two I branched out a little farther from the hole and these were recovered from areas also detected previously. The item on the left is what I believe to be the heel of a homemade shoe. Folks get a small coil after these last two trips with the legend and the small coil I believe both should be a must in your arsenal. In addition, as a foot note my home town has established a huge new park (Wannigan Regional Park). There are plans for a museum in the future. All my recoveries will be cleaned and preserved and donated to this museum.
Published by: Terry Shannon
