It turns out that living in a 130-year-old house is a constant adventure. We are constantly finding things that we didn’t know were there. One thing for example, Lori was checking the filter in a return air grill that is no longer in use. When she pulled out the filter, she found a Brinkman Flashlight that still works. A couple of weeks ago she found a nice picture frame behind one of the wardrobes the previous owners had left behind.
Last week I was talking to a store manager in Greenville. I told him about our old home and that it was once the main farmhouse on a huge piece of land. I told him that I had learned that much of the land was farmed by sharecroppers. He started asking me questions about the property that I didn’t know the answers to. Specifically, where the sharecroppers houses were, where the chicken house was, the location of the old outhouse and where the huge, three story tall barn was that had burned down a long time ago.
He explained that the reason he was asking was that he is a serious treasure hunter and he owns an impressive array of metal detecting equipment including a detector that will sort out the junk like nails and bottle caps and find things up to three feet deep. He said he would like permission to search the property and that he would give Lori and I half of everything he found. That proposal caught my interest. Let’s review: I don’t have to buy a bunch of expensive equipment, I don’t have to do any of the work, and I get HALF? SIGN ME UP!
The man also went on to say that he is a member of an East Texas Treasure hunting group and that people would pay us up to $25 a day to hunt for treasure and they would give us half of what we found. On the surface that prospect seemed intriguing but Lori quicky shot that idea down saying she wouldn’t mind one guy looking for treasure but a metal detecting free for all dig was not going to happen. I quickly agreed.
Back to my conversation with the store manager. I told him that there was a story that a previous owner of the house on the corner whose house backs up to our property was friends with Bonnie and Clyde and that they would sometimes hide out at his place back in the day. I told him it might be worth his while to search that area on our property although it would be more likely that if they buried money in the back yard, it would be the folding variety and not coins.
I gave the man my phone number and I’m anxiously waiting for him to follow up. In the mean time I contacted a man who owned our house in the 1970s and knew about as much about the house as anyone. He told me that the new barn was built on the site where the old barn had burned down. Since our barn has a dirt floor it is a prime candidate for treasure hunting. He also told me where the old sharecropper’s house was as well as the old outhouse. (The outhouse is a great prospect for treasure hunters because if someone dropped valuables down it, even if they noticed, they were unlikely to retrieve it. Also, kids back then were just like kids now. Today kids flush things down the toilet just like their great great grandparents threw stuff down the hole in the outhouse back in the day.)
We knew where the chicken house was. It is now our back deck and the kitchen which was originally beside the house is now the garden room. It still has the original “Ice Box” built into the wall. Since Lori would never allow her deck or garden room to be torn up, we are unlikely to look there, but I have noticed that there are some remains of what look like a concrete foundation near our driveway so I’m anxious to find out what that was.
No matter what, I’m sure we will find something interesting and I will certainly report back what we find but it might take a while.
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