7/23/22 Report - Variety of Types of Treasure You Can Find on The Treasure Coast.

Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.

Megalodon Tooth With Current Bid of $1400 in Current Sotheby's Natural History Auction.
Source: Megalodon Shark Tooth — South Carolina | Natural History, including Gorgosaurus | | Sotheby's (sothebys.com)

For years I've emphasized the many types of treasure that can be found in Florida.  You don't have to stick to one type.  You don't have to stick to metal treasures just because you have a metal detector.  Florida offers a tremendous variety of types of treasure.

We are well into a very productive shipwreck treasure salvage season on the Treasure Coast, but if you are a beach hunter, you might want to explore some other types of treasure.   There are seasons and times you might want to look for other things.

Lately, I've been very limited in the amount of time I can spend on treasure hunting.  I don't often have the time to drive to the beach and back.  That by itself takes over an hour both ways, at a minimum, so I've been doing some other things, especially hunting bottles, which I can do close to home and not waste any time driving.  While bottles might not interest everybody, at least when I get the urge to hunt, I can do that, and usually find a little something of interest.

The meg tooth shown above is not a Florida find, but meg teeth can be found in Florida.  Fossils, including shark teeth, can be found at times on our Treasure Coast beaches and I've seen a few in the Indian River Lagoon.  

My point is that there are a lot of things to be found, and when you can't hunt one thing, or maybe conditions aren't so great for what you prefer to do, there are other options.  I'll bet there are treasures close to your home that you pass by all the time without thinking about it.  I was amazed last year, how much there was to be found right next door to my own home, including metal, though not many coins, old bottles and other things of interest.

Some of those other types of treasures are worth a good bit.  Take, for example, the meg tooth shown above.  $1400 is more than most shipwreck coins found on the beach.  I enjoy finds that tell a story of what went on in the past, especially locally.

Yesterday, along with some metal-detected finds, I showed a Miami Biltmore Dairy bottle that requires some more research.  Someone was interested in buying it.  I found some other bottles the same day.  They weren't as nice, but they help to tell the story of the Treasure Coast as it was a 100 years ago.

One of those finds was this broken Springfield Breweries bottle from Massachusetts.  It is broken and so worth nothing, but I'll add it to my documented Fort Pierce-area bottle finds because of what it adds to the story.

Another bottle that I found the same day provided less information, but I picked it up because I think it will sun-purple nicely.  It has a nice big round bubble and is only very slight purple tinge now (below left).  I have another similar (I'll call it a pickle bottle.) that I've had sitting in the sun for a while and is nicely purpled (below right).  Too bad the photo doesn't show the color very well.

Two Old Unidentifiable Pickle Bottles

Iron in sand gives the glass a range of colors from light green to dark amber, depending on the amount of iron in the sand. To overcome this problem, some factories that used iron-bearing sands added manganese to their batch as a decolorizer. While this produces colorless glass, that glass will turn a light purple or amethyst color when it is exposed to sunlight...

Both historical and empirical evidence indicate that the previously accepted earlier date (1880) for the beginning of popularity of colorless glass container use in the United States as suggested by bottle collectors may be slightly incorrect. Popular use seems to have begun by at least the mid-1870s and was solidly in place by 1890. This dating cannot be generalized to all glass artifacts. Manganese was used in tableware by 1865 and in flat (window) glass in the U.S. long before 1880. A practical end date for manganese use in all but specialty bottles is about 1920, although some use continued until the early 1930s. The end of manganese use is generally concurrent with the end of mouth-blown bottle production.

Source: Front Matter - 40(2) (sha.org)

So if you find sun-purpled glass, the possible date range would appear to be mid-19th century up onto 1930.

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Nothing interesting in the forecasts.

Good hunting,

TreasureGuide@comcast.net