Three camps in three days

Hey everyone!  I got out this weekend to three different Civil War camps in as many days.  All three are associated with Sherman's march through North Carolina following their success at Bentonville, the surrender of the remaining Confederate forces, and the return home to the North.

The first camp I hunted on Friday with Jim from Touch the Past, and clearly illustrated the need for amateur historians like ourselves to save these relics before it is too late.  A large section of the camp had been developed into homes and strip malls long ago.  Now, stretching before us, was a large swath of cleared and graded land, slated for imminent development.  Once the concrete foundations and asphalt drives are put in place, those relics will never again see the light of day.  Even now, with the large amount of disturbance to the original topography, a great many relics have been destroyed by bulldozers or buried at unreachable depths under mountains of earth.  It was a sad sight.

We still managed to pull a few bullets from this area before moving on.  My take was one piece of camp lead and two Williams cleaner bullets.  We'll be back, but this was just meant to be a site survey and we had a second site to get to before the day was out.  Special thanks go out to Dan for turning us on to this site!!

Camp number two we discovered on January 6th, when a quick site survey turned up four shallow three-ring bullets, a large cent, and the base to a Williams cleaner bullet.  We returned to this site a second time on February 4th, and worked the site in a much slower and more methodical manner.  This yielded another four 58 caliber three ring bullets and two cleaners for me, and an equal number for Jim.  An interesting note - the cleaner top I found in February may well have come from the cleaner base I found in January!  We went back again on Friday, and really worked hard to find those small, deep signals.  Sure enough, we both pulled a pair of bullets again this time, all of them deeper.

I was also invited to detect another camp site yesterday by Glenn, Doug, and Mike from Woodland Detectors.  For the local detectorists, it's the infamous "Yankee Camp" discovered sometime last year, and pounded hard by a plethora of individuals (both invited by the original finders, as well as a few "claim jumpers", much to our chagrin).  It has yielded at least two plates in the past, along with dozens of buttons and hundreds of bullets.  Now it was hard work just to find a signal, but I did manage two 58 caliber three ring bullets that had been overlooked.  It was great to get together with the guys, and see Mike again for the first time since DIV.

So overall, it was a great weekend of relic hunting with new and old friends and a half dozen bullets thrown in for good measure.  Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you enjoyed the story and pictures!