Landfills Are Full of Treasure

Copyright Bill Gallagher
1925 Words




     The idea behind most landfills is improvement of real estate, believe it or not.  The filling in of low areas with debris and refuse, stuff we don't think we need anymore, brings the level of the land up, over time, and because our trash is gargantuan.  This occurs all over the place and has been going on for as long as people have been around.  It is, at the bottom line, a great redistribution of earth, and it is geologic in scope.
     Lots of times, after a dump has settled for awhile, houses are built on top, or shopping malls, or whatever.   People would be surprised how much garbage lie underneath swanky real estate.  The real problem with this is not cracked foundations or even bad gases being emitted, its what is known among hydro-engineers as Inner City Dump Sites, and they are perhaps the greatest water contaminators in our world.  Tampa alone has over 50 inner city dumps KNOWN, with others unknown, and many are REAL BIG.  The larger and older a city, the more inner city dump sites there will be.
     In earlier days the practice was to dig pits, and to discard garbage in them.  Some of the pits were burned, to make them last longer.  Generally speaking the early dumps were created out at the edge of things, away from town proper.  Today these trash pits lie like time capsules underneath any area that was once the edge of town.  As towns expanded into cities the trash dumps all become covered over, and new edges of town became new dump places.  The old Trash Pits and Outhouses which are hidden below city sprawl make for some of the best bottle digging in the world.  If the contents are sifted there are often coins and buttons of the same vintage as the bottles, with bottles are many times ornate and hand blown.   
     Some early dumps consist of settled piles, where trash was just left around in heaps.  In the desert southwest this is how it is.  If you ever hike in the desert trash piles are one thing you become familiar with right away, and many are pretty old.  One things sure:  none of the trash that was dumped ever walked away on its own, or got teleported out to the sun by aliens...no, most of it is still there, where it was deposited.
     Deposited.
     Like money in the bank.
     Recently I obtained a copy of a rare book by an old favorite of mine, H. Glenn Carson, formerly of Deming New Mexico.  The name of the book is "Cache Hunting", kind of an obscure subject, and I had only heard about it a couple of times, never came across a copy, wondered if it really existed.  That was before my treasure hunting partner found someones old collection of treasure hunting books in a thrift store, and there it was, in with some  others. It sported the only picture of the man I had ever seen, right on its cover.   He was shown with a military cache he had found at Fort Cody, there in Deming.  
     The book is partly inspirational reading, but it contains many sound rules concerning the pursuit of buried money too.  Also covered in depth are many classic cases where caches were actually recovered, along with some well known and not so well known cache leads.  A lot of what is written is Mr. Carsons personal study of Human Psychology, and though not usually addressed in such graphic terms, this is what I found most useful about the book, because its the most pertinent study of all when looking for items people have hidden, lost, or discarded.
     That last one, discarded, is what concerns us here, because this article is about treasure hunting old dumps, and what it means.  Where I live there are many old dumps of various sizes and shapes, some take up whole mountainsides, and can easily be seen using google earth.  By the way if you are not familiar with google earth then you are really missing out and one of the best treasure leads I can give you is to learn about it at all costs.  Have a librarian show you, its totally worth it, its another world altogether.  Find Real Treasure With Satellites.
     Now, back to our story.
     As said, there are a lot of dumps where I live, and I am sure there are many where you live too.  This is a fact of life on planet Earth.  The greatest thing about dumps to me is this: most have been grossly overlooked for a long time as far as being sources of treasure are concerned.  There is the old dump stigma because dumps are places of refuse, and offal, and everything in between.  Nasty places, yuck.  I will not argue, but the sun and rain are great sterilizers, and offal doesn't hang around long.  Anything over 50 years old is composed only of things that couldn't rot, and even iron eventually just disappears back into the earth, leaving nothing behind but flakes and a stain.  
     A lot of old dumps are from the time BA.  BA means Before Aluminum.  Many items of aluminum we use today were made from either brass, copper, or even silver before aluminum was perfected.  Those are good dumps to search because just the scrap will usually pay for your time.  Couple this fact with the sure knowledge that these older dumps contain older collectible things, and you can see great possibilities.  I have metal detected old dumps, and done very well, but at bigger dumps I mostly employ intense surface searching.  This means knowing what certain items of value look like, and actively searching for them with my eyes.  Things like discs, especially green/brown discs (Brass copper bronze) and most especially black discs (silver).  I look for certain kinds of order amongst the busy background and after awhile good things start to stand out better.  I take my time, let my eyes adjust.  It helps to get closer to the ground and not take so much in at once, concentrate on smaller viewing areas.  The pictures in this article are the better collectibles from three short visits to a dump I only surface searched, I didn't use the detector because there was too much metal everywhere.
     The main psychological quirks to understand in this avocation concern the reasons people dump things.  These reasons are probably familiar to everyone, though its not something everyone thinks about much, just people like us.  I guess the number one reason people toss out garbage is because its used up, there is nothing left of value.  These ideas of value are strictly a matter of perspective though.  I am sure you've heard that one mans trash is anothers treasure, well, there is good reason for this popular saying.  Add antiquity to the formula and even the valueless items can become antiques worth great bucks, as long as they persist.  Time is a gravity engine, squishing everything back into mud eventually, so material that persists through time really is extra valuable, compared to material ethereal.  The older a dump is, the more full of persisting things it becomes.  Did you get that?  After all the iron has turned to rust and washed away, the gold tie tacs and the silver spoons and the copper coins will still be there.  Don't forget.  This is a process working in your favor, and if you can exploit it then you will be better off.  An advantage.
     Another reason people dump things is because of catastrophe.  If you ever find a dump deposited by affluent people directly after the First Great Depression you will find all sorts of interesting and valuable things.  Many people who were well off and thought themselves secure realized all of a sudden they had stupidly trusted a bunch of lying fools, and many left town quickly.  Huge boxes of belongings were toted out to dump sites everywhere by those people or the people who cleaned up after them.  It is very hard to describe the things they left behind, you really have to see it to believe it.  Because they were in a big hurry and wanting to travel light they discarded many things they had hitherto considered valuable.  Time just added value.  One dump I came across like this had lots of silver and lots of jewelry, along with very odd bottles that had contained rare and expensive perfumes.  
     In Florida, where a lot of wealthy people retired, it was not uncommon for a single older person to die and leave behind a vast amount of personal belongings in their house.  Auctioning of those belongings became big business and still is, but invariably there are dozens of boxes at the end of an estate liquidation that must be "Disposed of", IE taken to the dump.  The people who liquidate these estates are in it to make a living, and are after the faster money.  They have their system down and they do not deviate much from it at all.  I have heard many stories of people finding fantastic things, like old coin collections, in boxes taken to the dump, and I myself, being ever vigilant, have found some crazy things too.  I once oversaw the disposal of refuse at a Tampa flea market, and that was instructional, let me tell you.  The flea market is many times the last stop before the dump, and all I can say is that people are generally rather careless about the value of things if it does not fit their world view or their system of salvage.  You would think they would consider better information on how to salvage things worth pursuing but most do not.  Oh the stories I could tell.  Just a few months of salvaging lenses from old projectors and cameras gave me a big box of them and they all sold well on the internet.  All I did was use a hammer and pliers to extract the parts as I was throwing them in the dumpster.  The copper and brass I salvaged there became almost cumbersome.  I didn't get it all either, just a little bit, for a short period of time.
    Obsolescence is another reason things get dumped.  Two good examples are typewriters, which became dinosaurs almost overnight at the birth of the computer age, and conventional camera equipment, once the digital age really kicked in.  There are many other things like this.  As already mentioned, many metal manufacturing processes changed forever upon the invention of aluminum.  Plastic then replaced a lot of aluminum.  It goes on and on.
     One thing that will always create a trip to the dump is moving.  The farther and bigger the move, the more boxes and bags of trash will end up in the dump.  I know this first hand.  Also, I have helped others move, many times, and this rule seems universal.  It too has been going on for a long time.   I've read more than once about people throwing large sums of cash money in the trash by accident, and in the old days the dump was considered by some to be a good hiding area for some valuable things because of its nature.  Most people are repelled by dumps, and would not think of looking there for hidden money.  Psychology again, The Psychology Of Stash.
     It is always a good idea to apply your personal experiences to times past because human nature has stayed fairly consistent even though the world itself changes about us. This forms a continuity that will enlighten your mind, a treasure in its own right, and will also give you an edge when looking for valuables of any type.
     

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