Every detectorist dreams of finding a cache. Coins, jewelry or other valuables, buried or hidden to protect them. I just found my first cache but it wasn’t what I expected. I was hunting a 100 year old house in the Ortega area of Jacksonville. This is an area full of century old mansions. It’s an area with a past too. In the 1920s and 30s, Chicago mobsters would spend their winters here. A block away is a house where Machine Gun Kelly spent six months and narrowly escaped a police raid. This house has a triple lot yard but the owner repeatedly told me I wouldn’t find anything. The first day I searched the front yard and harvested a number of Wheat pennies and a ‘35 Washington quarter. The second day I started on the backyard and by the side yard fence I got a deep brass signal. At about 10 inches down I was scooping sand from between tree roots and felt a jar. I carefully loosened the packed sand from around it and pulled it free. When I wiped off the dirt I saw bullets.....BIG BULLETS! I put my pinpointer into the hole and it went nuts. I could feel objects in the walls of the hole and worked a couple free. They were stripper clips holding 5 rounds each. There were 50 clips and nearly 300 bullets. I took some to a gun shop and they are 30.06 made in 1933. I believe I also found parts of a rifle. And I’m still searching the yard in case there may be more. Of course the real mystery is WHO buried them and WHY? We will probably never know.

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