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How Deep To Dig?


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8 hours ago, sjmpainter said:

Eklawok, Silver in Anchorage is hard to find. I think the question is not so much how deep but where to look. Here is a post on the topic.

Most of the tot lots have been revamped with new play areas in the last five years and when that happens they usually dig the sand/wood chip ect. and replace it with new. Most down a foot.

With that being, I notice a lot of the off the beaten path parks do have older coins but the silver is still elusive.  Its very interesting I can find penny and nickels to about 40's - 50's but the dimes and quarters and what not 65 is the limit. The only exception is foreign coins that do not have silver.

I don't want to turn you off, I am sure silver is out there somewhere  just know it will take effort. And if you find one let me know.

HH.

Some pretty good stuff here. But I agree with what steve had to say in the links, Anchorage is a bit on the young side to find any silver on a regular basis. And the older areas that would be the most likely to have it have been probably hunted to death, or have been paved over. Although I do wonder about the yards around some of the older houses around town. If a guy was to go out here (around Anchorage )shoot for silver the 3 main things that he would have to take into consideration are location, location, and location. I would figure the further south you would go the less likelyhood to find them would be. However if a guy were to hit up areas like Spenard, Fairview, Mountain view, and the older areas still open in the downtown area, the higher the probability. Also keeping in mind that it seems that most, but not all, of the parks in Anchorage were established in the 70's and 80's. Here is a useful link for anybody inerested:

http://anchorageparkfoundation.org/directory/

It doesn't cover all of, what i consider parks (like Javier De Lavega-which may be considered a ball field and not a "park"). 

This is some good information that I am getting from everybody here. I think that it is cool that I am getting advice from not only from local people, but also from overseas. 

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Having been alive and coin collecting in the magic year of 1964, I think I can add a bit of perspective here.  As most of you US residents (should) know, all dimes, quarters, and halves were 90% silver in 1964 and prior.  What you might not know is that in 1965 there was an attack in the US Congress against coin collecting.  In their infinite wisdom the Congress decided that coin collectors were a menace to the US economy.  In 1965 (and for the following few years) they did everything they could (which was a lot) to hinder coin collecting.  Prior to 1965, coins carried mint marks indicating at which location they were minted.  That was stopped in 1965 (but soon later restored in 1968).  Related, but likely driven by other concerns such as the cost of the base metal required to make coins, silver was rejected and a copper core plus copper-nickel faces ("clad") replaced the makeup of dimes, quarters, and halves in 1965.

Ironically, in the late 90's and following, Congress decided that coin collectors (and hoarders) actually added to the value of the national treasury and minted collector coins, such as the popular state quarters!  But that is a sidelight which is of minor or no relevance to coin hunting detectorists.

Let's step back a bit.  Coin collectors in the purest sense know which dates and mintmarks are scarce/rare/valuable.  The charlatans of the hobby only recognize gross features.  "Wheat cents" (1909-1957) were easily recognized because of their reverse design.  Buffalo/Indian nickels, and their predecessors (Liberty or 'V' nickels) even more obvious, as were other mintages of Indian Head pennies, Mercury dimes, Standing Liberty Quarters, and Walking Liberty halves (throw in the Barber designs pre-1917).  So whenever the public heard that a particular design might be valuable they vacuumed them up in short order (being a few years, typically).

The 1964/65 transition from 90% silver to clad wasn't quite as easy for the numbskulls to figure out, but both the edge (copper center of the clad coins) and overall color of the faces (white silver vs. dull off-white cupro-nickel) made the 1964 and earlier coinage fairly easy marks.  In my observation the clads replaced the silvers in about (or less than) five years.  The Wheaties hung on longer, and the Jeffersons, with no clearly defined marker, were the last holdout for true coin collectors desperately grasping the previous simple practice of searching pocket change and bank rolls for keepers.

Putting it all together, 1970 was pretty much the death knell for silver coins in US circulation.  (On a side note, Canadian coins had a similar timeline.)  That's 46 years ago.  If you find a silver coin in the ground in the US you can be 99% confident it was deposited at least 45 years ago.  If you're hunting a park, schoolyard, churchyard, ballfield, etc. which was at best a farm field 45 years ago you are very unlikely to find silver, no matter how deep your detector can see.  (Obviously the exceptions occur when prior to being public places those locations were frequented by humans dropping pocket change.)

Give credit to those who have noted here that there are many variables that lead to the depth of silver coins.  Not the least of these are seasonal freeze/thaw heaving which can push coins deeper but also pull them closer to the surface.  On an opposite point, the idea that "all of the good coins have already been found" implies giving previous searchers credit for careful, systematic, thorough ground coverage and digging.  That simplistic view ignores the sloppiness/laziness of human nature.  Throw in the fact that as detectors get better they find things even the best of previous generations were unable to find due to the technological limits of their equipment and the improvements today.

Personally I'd rather spend all day resulting in finding a single common date silver Roosevelt dime than one resulting in a bagful of clad quarters.  For me it's not the total value at the end of the day but the thrill of the specie.  Silver, you may be only a prince compared to King gold, but you are still royalty.

 

 

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I remember the times of which you speak in the hay day of coin collecting, I just turned 63 a couple of months ago and collected coins also. Every paycheck my dad would run us down to the bank and cash it in silver dollars, we'd go through them keep anything we were missing and re-rolled and do it again if we weren't tired of it all by the first trip, it was a lot of fun. I also remember when the mint would chop the silver dollars up and sell you back a 1 ounce Baggie of the chopped up coin (pretty sure that was the mint and not a third party).

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Silver is nice BUT the clad coins will pay for gas and batteries and food altho you may have to clean the crud off them in a rock tumbler before they are spendable. Heck, its been at least 10 years since I last found a silver coin locally. Can't be digging craters in public parks and schoolyards unless you want to get banned. That where the pinpointers come in right handy. My coin dealer is willing to sell me $100 face value in common date silver coins + the silver value , dunno how many I would end up with? Do that every month and after a year, would have  a good stash of spendable silver at home for in case the doomsayers are ever right and the world collapses into chaos. Which almost did happen in 2007-2008 as I recall.

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19 minutes ago, 1515Art said:

I remember the times of which you speak in the hay day of coin collecting, I just turned 63 a couple of months ago and collected coins also. Every paycheck my dad would run us down to the bank and cash it in silver dollars, we'd go through them keep anything we were missing and re-rolled and do it again if we weren't tired of it all by the first trip, it was a lot of fun. I also remember when the mint would chop the silver dollars up and sell you back a 1 ounce Baggie of the chopped up coin (pretty sure that was the mint and not a third party).

I have a  near mint 1881 Morgan silver dollar here, it is absolutely perfect except two little marks on the edge.

john

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On 4/21/2016 at 7:26 PM, Eklawok said:

I know that this question is subjective, but I am going to ask anyways. For the guys out there who have found, and continue to find, old silver coins, how deep on average are you finding them?

Eklawok,

I don't know if this will help but it's something I was thinking about today.  I don't know how things were in the 50's and early 60's in AK but where I lived in a small town in Ohio there was always a neighborhood store.  Almost no one drove to the store, pretty much everyone walked.  Often, the parents who only had one vehicle and most often only dad drove it.  Mom would send us waking to the store at least every other day.  In route, now and then kids being kids would loose change.  If you look at old photos of your town find the old stores and if you can search along the route to the store.  More than once when I was a kid I would search the grass along the walk near the store and now and then I would find a coin.  School was the same way.  We all walked to school and sometimes had change so don't just check out the school or the store but the route the kids took especially near to each.  

Terry

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2 hours ago, auminesweeper said:

I have a  near mint 1881 Morgan silver dollar here, it is absolutely perfect except two little marks on the edge.

john

Pretty nice John great coin, when we sold our collection we had almost a full set of Morgan's Missing only two coins the 1893s and it's been so long I forget now the other one, an 1895 I believe. Had a full set of peace dollars and a half dozen rolls of uncirculated matching dates peace dollars, a full set of Jefferson nickels and full set of Lincoln pennies a few old gold pieces some Hawaiian coins, private fractional golds and a pile of Indian head pennies melted together in the remains of a metal box from the San Francisco earthquake and fire.

i was 8 years old in school lunch line one day and we had been collecting for a couple of years now so I knew even then the key dates I had asked the lunch lady if I could check the dates of the coins in the till box and spotted an 1893s Morgan in the till. With the innocence of an 8 year old I explained this was a key coin we were missing and asked if I could use my lunch money for the coin instead of lunch that day, she declined my request. When my dad got home from work we went to the bank the school used and checked every silver they had on hand and it was not there.

id like to have all of those now of course, but that's how it goes.

my grandfather had a transit company and on one visit gave me a moving box full of old baseball cards left behind from some estate in SF, this was the early 1960s hundreds of cards and even mix of what were semi new at the time and old cards with funny looking guys in the pictures most of these were really early, I wasn't really a fan so they just sat in my closet along with every comic book ever printed from the later part of the 1950s up until the fateful day in 1963. I headed up to the sierras to go fishing with my grandparents and when I got home...  All gone to the trash... Love to have those back also.

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Wow....so much good information here. When I posted this thread I didn't realized how much good "searching" information that I would receive. It really is inspiring to me to go and really look in the older areas where I live. I just pawned my kiddo off on the grandparents tonight for the weekend and may have to do as such tomorrow. In the spirit of this thread,  I have snapped a few pictures of a dime that I had found a few years ago in some pocket change. It is a 1940 something. The last number of the year has rubbed off. It appears to be a 1946. I have actually kept it separated in one of my gold pans. I think that it would be cool to find a buffalo nickel or another older coin just because it would be older than what I am (being born in 77). Kinda funny too now that I think of it, I haven't seen a bicentennial 1976 quarter in a while either. I m8gbt have to check my change jar for one. I remember them as being quite common at one point when I was a kid. 

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