Gold Prospecting, Treasure Hunting, Mining, Relic Hunting, and Metal Detecting in New York

Empire State

RELICS, COINS, & JEWELRY

New York has a rich history of early settlements and battlefields - the perfect combination for an energetic relic hunter! Here's a few more ideas to get you started:

Schools and College Campuses
Parks / Playgrounds / Picnic Areas
Foundations, Wells, and Cellar Holes of Old Churches or Houses
Downtown Construction Sites
Swimming Holes, Beaches, and Natural Springs
Camp Grounds, Boy Scout Camps, WPA Camps, and Mining Camps
Sports Facilities
Ghost Towns
Rodeo Arenas, Riding Stables, and Race Tracks
Old Fair and Carnival Locations
Old Town Dumpsites

GEMS

A few nice-quality stones of actinolite have been marketed from an undisclosed deposit in New York. It is not clear whether the actinolites are from the deposits in St. Lawrence County that produce the fine-quality, purple tremolite. Deposits in the State also produce facet-quality calcite, celestite, chondrodite, diopside, dravite, fluorites, and sphalerites.

Deposits of industrial garnet are found at two locations in New York. In the Gore Mountain area, industrial garnet is mined as the primary product; and near the town of Willsboro, byproduct of it is recovered as wollastonite mining.

The deposit near Gore Mountain is an almandite-bearing diorite of uncertain, igneous or metamorphic origin. The garnet is present as imperfectly developed crystals surrounded by a rim of coarsely crystalline hornblende. The crystals range from about 1 millimeter to almost 1 meter in diameter but average about 100 millimeters in diameter. The garnet has a pronounced laminated structure, which enables it to naturally break into thin plates from about 2 to 6 millimeters in thickness. Garnet fragments maintain this platy particle shape even as they are crushed smaller and smaller.

These same deposits in Warren County contain good to fine quality facet-grade garnets. The garnet is a solid solution of pyrope-almandite-grossularite that results in a pleasant deep brownish-red material which often has an orange cast. Beautiful small stones can be cut, but larger stones are too dark to be attractive.

Herkimer County, NY, is probably the most famous for quartz crystals in the country. The most productive area for "Herkimer diamonds" (as the well-formed, mostly doubly-terminated rock crystals are known) is the rock outcrops and associated soils in a belt between the towns of Middleville and Herkimer, NY. The belt extends about 5 km south of Middleville. At least two other areas in the Middleville area also produce "Herkimers." Most mineral collectors feel their collection is incomplete without at least one Herkimer. The crystals are faceted, raw crystals are mounted to be used as pendants and earrings, and crystals are even bored to be strung as beads.

Currently, the crystals are not mined commercially but are collected by hobbyist and professional collectors. The crystals are found loose in the soil where they have weathered from the underlying rock or they are taken from cavities in freshly broken rock. The cavities maybe so small as to contain only a single 4 to 5 millimeter crystal or large enough to contain hundreds of crystals with some of the crystals over 100 millimeters in diameter. The smaller crystals, 4 to 12 millimeters, tend to be the best and some of the crystals contain inclusions of carbonaceous material and liquid- or gas-filled voids.

LOST TREASURE

As in other areas of the US, there are several tales of lost treasure in New York concerning caches buried for safety. In many of these stories, people either died or forgot where they buried the stash. Contributing factors include:

1. Federal laws making possession of gold illegal in the early 1900s

2. Distrust of banks during the Great Depression.

At the old Jeffery Amherst Fort site at Crown Point, Essex County, treasure may have been buried.
At Grand Island in Lake Erie, not far from Niagara Falls, a fortune is said to have been hidden by an early resident.
Near Hell's Gate in the East River a ship carrying a vast fortune was lost many years ago, and although the area is not large, the hulk of the ship in question has never been found.
The west shore of Lake Champlain is said to offer great possibilities for electronic metal detector use, and quite a few old coppers have turned up.

These excerpts are a sampling from American Coin Treasures and Hoards