Written by the TreasureGuide for the Exclusive Use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
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| Dollman Beach Thursday Morning. |
When you get a bigger surf the beach conditions can improve, but not unless other things are right. In this case we are having east winds and building rather than eroding beaches. The seaweed being deposited on the beach is not a good sign. I took a look at a few beaches today and they all were pretty much the same.
At the southern end of my survey, I stopped at Dollman beach. It was very much like the other beaches I saw this morning. The beach front was convex. That is also a sign of a building beach.
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| Dollman Beach Thursday Morning. |
You might remember back some years ago when an anchor was found in the water off Dollman.. When this beach is eroded you can also find some fossils there.
At Walton Rocks I found this area where the sand was building up on top of seaweed. You don't see that too often.
The beach front was convex there too.
I looked at Blind Creek too, but it was the same.
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| Frederick Douglass Beach Thursday Morning. |
Here is Frederick Douglass. I took my detector out and found a charm or small pendant there. Didn't take the time to really look at it much yet.
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| Frederick Douglass Beach Thursday Morning. |
Then I did a little (very little) detecting at John Brooks.
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| John Brooks Beach Thursday Morning. |
There were few targets at John Brooks.
Not many people at the beach early this morning.
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| John Brooks Beach Thursday Morning. |
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A couple days ago I posted a couple mystery items. They were identified.
William R. said those big heavy iron items are called Tamper Teeth. They are part of a machine used to repack the rock under the cross ties.
He sent the following photo. The arrows point to the tamper teeth.
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| Tamper Machine. |
William Y. also identified the items and added the following additional information
The two items are from a tamping machine. They are the feet that pushes stone under the ties. As these feet wear out they are taken off and a welder builds them back up. I operated a tamping machine in the 1970’s. By the size of the rail anchors and fishplate wrenches the rail would probably be under 100 pound rail, that was probably lifted by a few men, whereas the rail now a days is around 130-140 pound rail and must be moved with a crane. The site could have been a derailment where men had to work 24 hours to get the rail back together. I say that because and lot of stuff gets left behind during the fixing of a train wreck. The finds appear to be around 1920-1940 maybe earlier hard to tell
Bill Y.
Thanks Bill.
Very interesting. I never thought of it as being possibly wreck related. That could explain some things. It fits with the Stuart Bottling Works bottle date.
I also found some spikes that seemed to be smaller than most. I'm not talking about the ones I call miniature spikes, but some that are about two thirds or three fourths the size of the other ones. I wondered if they might be from an earlier period. Maybe they were used with the smaller rail sizes.
Thanks much guys.
I'm taking a very systmatic approach to this detecting site. I was very surprised by how many items are on this site, and I am not even half way done yet. I have also been surprised by the number of intact bottles that were found while digging targets. Based upon what I've found so far, I'd expect to find several times the number of bottles I found so far before I am done with the site.
I'm taking this in stages. I'll explain more of the my system for exploring this site in the future. There are layers and stages involved.
I'll talk more about strategies and techniques too. When analyzing the history of a site like this railroad site, rather than wandering around helter skelter randomly cherry picking the easy items that present themselves and ending up with little meaningful evidence, I like to be more systematic, thorough and empirically analytical.
There is a time and place for being intuitive and unorganized in a search, but not when seriously trying to determine the history of a site and what went on there.
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It looks like the next few days we'll get more of the same type of surf. I'm not expecting beach detecting conditions to improve in that time.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
