<p><em>Finding Coppers With Doug Schilling and Tony Mantia, both E-TRAC users</em></p> <p><strong>Pardons to Joni Mitchell for parody of her song, but Doug and I did wake up early to beat the heat and the raindrops.</strong> We were invited to hunt an old farm house site and it turned out to be one of our best days ever with both of us scoring firsts, for oldest coins, varieties we have never found before and a wide range of types of copper coins found.</p> <p>We started out back away from the house so we would not disturb our host's wife since she was still sleeping. It took quite a bit of restraint for me not to holler out as I found my oldest coin ever and a first, it was an 1828 large cent. It had a hole in the middle and is quite worn but I was excited to find it. Doug made the next good find, an 1863 Civil War Store Card for Brown & Dills Dentists in Piqua, Ohio; it is listed in Rulau's book.</p> <p>I was finding some wheats, including a nice 1912, when my next good signal came in as a 12-42-12-43 at six inches. I started digging figuring maybe a deep wheatie or dime. I was carefully digging dirt and placing it on my towel and found it was now out of the hole. Imagine my delight to find not a wheatie, not a dime, but a beautiful 1866 two cent piece!</p> <p>Doug's detector started heating up, his next find was a 1907 Indian Head and then he got a 12-46 signal he said let's do a full dig video on this one. Yep he was right to ask as out came a beautiful 1832 Largie with a full Liberty on the head band. Then it started to rain, we went to get something to eat then hit a park because we just didn't want the day to end. I pulled a 1917 wheatie and that was it for the day...or so we thought.</p> <p>When we got back to Doug's we videoed the finds but part of it got cut off because of some camera malfunction... probably user error! Doug picked up the four clad quarters he found and handed me one and said that looks funny, I looked at it and said that isn't a quarter, better wash it off. He came out shaking saying it's a draped bust coin... and it was an 1802 Draped Bust half cent! A very scarce bordering on rare date.</p>