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created by Jimithyashford on 03/02/2025 at 17:42 UTC
25 upvotes, 3 top-level comments (showing 3)
Over the course of the last few weeks, when the weather allowed, I have been doing some backwoods hiking metal detecting. Hiking and being outdoors is one of my big hobbies, and packing up your equipment to hike way out into the middle of nowhere and detect an old homestead site is a great way to combine two of my passions.
One thing about old homestead detecting in the deep woods is: you don't find much. Well, you find a ton of iron and horseshoe and nails and that kind of stuff, but you don't find many "good" finds. And the sites are often so overgrown it makes detecting quite difficult. But it's still fun.
So, here are a few sites I've visited in the last few weeks: I will be changing some place names and not giving exact locations, although people familiar with these areas could probably figure it out.
1: Max Creek Cabin- The hike out to this location wasn't very far, only about 1.5 miles from where I parked, but man was the terrain steep. I've included the topo view. The people that lived out there must have had a hell of a time getting in and out with horse and buggy, but they made it work. This site was really cool since the old original homestead log cabin was still there. It has collapsed in on itself, but still, a very cool find. Look at those half dovetail end joints and all that hand-hewn log work. It was a very small one room cabin. Typically this kind of cabin would be the first dwelling the man would go out and build on the site initially, then he'd go back to St Louis or wherever, fetch his wife, and they'd live in it until the second larger home got built. One interesting feature of this cabin was a fieldstone wall closing off a small pasture next to the cabin. These kinds of fieldstone walls are very common in new england, but I've never seen one around here. It is very common to see long lines of stacked field stone, where the rocks were piled up at the end after a field has been plowed, but that's not what this was, this was a proper fieldstone wall. I didn't find any relics of note, old tractor parts and rusted out washbasins, horse shoes, nails, wire, mattress springs, that kind of stuff. Still a really neat find.
2: Tater Hill Ranch- This place isn't quite as old, based on the style of foundation and the kinds of housewares and items I found, I'm guessing it was built in the 1910s or 1920s, and inhabited up until the last 50s or maybe into the 60s. The hike out to this location was not difficult, there are old road/ATV trails that lead out there, but the hike was long. It's about 3 miles from where I parked, so 6 mile total hike with a few hours metal detecting in the middle. Definitely took a full day. Probably the coolest thing I found was this old broken down pickup, I'm not great at IDing vehicles, but it looks like it's from the 40s to my eye.
3: Baldknobber's Homestead- This was pretty cool. The hike out to it isn't too bad, maybe a mile from where you'd have to leave most vehicles. An ATV or vehicle with some offroading ability could drive right out to it. I went out there cause I saw an dot on an old map and knew there was a homestead. When I got out there I found there was also a small family cemetery. The last headstone there showed the guy dying in the 1890s, so the site is pretty old for this part of the world. I detected around the place, there is no building or foundation left, but there is a flat area with smaller trees where you can tell a building once sat. I don't know if it was the house or maybe a barn. I found a ton of horse shoes, horse tack, square nails, and old Froe blade, cast iron stove parts, a few harmonica reeds, pretty typical stuff for a site of that age. You can tell the family was probably pretty poor by the horse tack. All of the horse tack I found was iron. Families with a bit more money had horse tack made of brass. But the real interesting part came when I got back home and looked up the guy from the tombstone that was out there. The fella was a notorious Baldknobber, one of the leaders of the Christian County chapter of the Baldknobbers. He lived in that hollow with his wife and 8 children, he was a woodworker by trade. He and a few other Baldknobbers invaded the home of a rival in the county and murdered him in the early 1890s, and they were arrested and held in the county jail in Ozark for over a year while they appealed their case to the supreme court, and ultimately they were hung in Ozark in a botched execution that became a sensational story at the time, reporting on in national papers. Apparently it took almost an hour to hang them and some of them had to be dropped three times before they finally died. It was pretty gruesome, you can find lots of old newspaper articles about it. Then he was taken back and buried in that hollow, his wife and kids moved out soon there after, from what I can tell the abandoned cabin was there up until around WW1 when either it was demolished or washed away in a flood or something. I left the details a bit vague on purpose, but there's enough there that if you google around and bit I'm sure you'll figure it out.
Part of my personal philosophy is that time spent going and exploring the world is never time wasted. If you get out into wild spaces, follow your nose off on some trek, down some road you'd never go, you will ALWAYS find something that made the trip worthwhile. So while the metal detecting was kinda lousy, the exploration was top tier. I didn't go looking for the grave of a notorious outlaw, or for one of the only fieldstone walls in the Ozarks, but I got out into the world and I chanced across them.
Comment by armenia4ever at 03/02/2025 at 17:58 UTC
5 upvotes, 0 direct replies
You know, this is the kind of field trip that I as a kid ALWAYS wanted to have. You never know what you'll find.
Comment by Zozo061050 at 03/02/2025 at 18:12 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Years ago I went over to Murder Rock and the old mines up on the mountain (where Johnny Morris' Buffalo Ridge is now) and did some metal detecting at some old homesites and at the entrances to the mines. It was a really cool experience. I'm sure it's closed off to the public now that Johnny owns it.
Comment by Professional-Bee9037 at 03/02/2025 at 19:40 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Cool! I have nothing more to say. I’m at 65-year-old suffering from severe sciatic problems so I’m not gonna go tromping around. But what a great time for it. Hope you’re going today cause it’s beautiful out but it’s still early enough. Snakes are slow. Ticks aren’t out best time of year to go to the woods.