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Things You Find In A Field

I hope to find the 12 foot log chain I swear I saw get dumped into the manure spreader this fall. I know which area of the field I am watching when I start cultivating.
 
I was discing in tall weeds,and my tractor ran up on something I thought it was a big rock, but turned out to be a complete chevy v8 eingine. I hit a fire hydrant one time mowing. Don't know why it didn't bust off, but it didn't. Lots of water pipes. About anything of value was a steam heater of some kind. It had about 25 pounds of brass, and copper.Stan
 
I was taking fence rails off posts in a weaning pasture we were no longer using some time in the early 90s, I must have dropped or forgot to pick it up a nail puller/ pry bar. About 2 years ago I was walking from a hay field to go back up to the barn when I stopped to wiz, and saw the pry bar laying there, rusted and pitted, come to think of it I don't know we're I put it again? Lol.
 
Found an old grease gun years ago. I found a folded up dollar on the edge of the road once and a nickel on the corner. I guess it pays to go for a walk lol.
 
I live straight south of camp Grayling in northern lower mi. My back food plot had never been plowed and I was plowing it the plow started to act funny.I raised it up and on the front point was a set of pack spenders with the pack and canteen on it. I never did find a body but have always wondered.
 
We turned a couple old farmsteads back into farmland and found a lot of harness and horse drawn equipment parts - usually wedged onto the points of the chisel plows or field cultivators.

Did find some Indian hammers but no arrowheads on our farm. Also found large stones that the Indians used to grind seeds for food.
 
Occasionally Ill find one of those rings off and old non-press wheeled drill stuck to the point of a cultivator shovel, and every now and then an old fencing staple wedged over the disc openers on the press drill. Funny how those things hit just right to catch, and it makes you wonder how much more crap is out in the field!
 
Guys, I Farmed a dry-land Half-Section in the Okla. Strip. It had had an old Dug-Out on it at one time, After every rain I could find a handful of old Marbles! Every time!!... occasionally old harness hardware, found the remains of pistol once, not even recognizable except for the silhouette, a mass of rust!
The marbles were my main interest!
Later,
John A.
 
For years, I'd snag the plow on what I thought was an old foundation. Decided to root it out one spring - it was a tombstone for a man named Harvey W. Johnson b. Jan 22, 1825 d. April 27, 1892. Harvey owned the property many years ago. Turned out, Harvey died first and his family erected the stone for him out at the local graveyard. Later his wife died, and the family had a double stone made for them. Then they had Harvey's old stone left over, and what do you do with dad's leftover tombstone? Bury it, I guess. . .
 
When a tornado ripped through Parkersburg IA, there were family pics in our fields. I am over 100 miles on a crows fly from there, sad day!
 
Found a piece of a broken arrow head. While fencing I found a pair of fencing pliers one time and a fence stretcher another time that others have lost. Dad found about 8 arrowheads. Most of them were broken ones. Numerous deer antlers. Been lucky and never have gotten any poked through a tire like others have found them. Dad found an indian head penny on a dirt road at the corner. As it turned out, boys use to get together there about 100 years ago and wrestle. Sister found another one while metal detecting down on the pond dam. Wouldn't of thought you would of found an indian head penny there. Pond was built in the late 50's. My uncle tore a house down and found 2 silver dollars on the ground under the floor. Somebody must of lost them while under the house in the crawl space years ago. Probly just slid out of their pocket. Well enough on that, just a few things that come to mind.
 
Mattress while bushhogging, luckily not a spring mattress.

Lots of horseshoes and harness bits.

Broken pottery.

Old metal off farm equipment such as dump rake teeth and mower sections.

Biggest I've heard off is someone hit a chrome stack. After excavation they found the previous owner 20 years ago had buried a highway tractor he claimed had been stolen.
 
Found a used casing for a 105mm Howitzer! It was a blank so it is only about 8" long but sure was a surpise. I was picking rocks and thought it was a piece of pipe.
 
Horse shoes, broken pieces of old ceramic, or "china" dinnerware, old cups, plates, I've got mostly every piece in a can somewhere on the shelf, some of the pieces match !

I've found some broken glass, old bottles etc. Also old farm dumps adjacent to fields, small or larger ones. At times miscellaneous things show up, from earlier times of farming.

I did find an antler shed this year in a field that I mow, could have stuck in a tire, its good to walk these places in the spring before the grass and whatever else comes up, after being matted down all winter by snow.

Sometimes I have found old wear parts from tillage equipment.
 
pretty much same as others, but I found a bill fold I had lost off tractor in 1960, saw it on ground in field when I was removing about 10 foot of barbed wire from combine feeder chain. Still had two bucks in it.. Lost 20 foot log chain in early 90's, saw it fall off, was gonna pick it up next time around, never have found it.
 
3/4" x 15' chain (HEAVY!) apparently lost/buried by a pipeline contractor some 25 years earlier.

A $20 digital wristwatch I'd lost a year earlier. Had only gained a couple minutes while MIA.

Several carved flint arrow heads and spear points.

A cute matching set of bra and nnalert. Sadly no trace of the owner...

An NOAA radiosonde launched a couple days earlier from an airbase in Kansas (I'm in western NY.)

More @#$%^! rocks than I care to think of.

An occasional hand tool (wrenches, vice grips, etc) - most lost by me.

A nice 3 x D cell LED flashlight sporting the local electric utility logo. A bit banged up but works fine (apparently off a lineman's truck and bounced into the field).
 
Found the center nose weight for a JD 40T, 420T, 430T, with the field cultivator in one field. Didnt know what it was for at first, but found the JD and casting number on it and looked it up. Dads buddy had a 40T that he had all of the nose weight pieces for except that weight, so I gave it to him. Found in another field a Farmall rear wheel weight like would fit on a C on up. Rolled it over to the fenceline, haven't went back for it yet. Hoping to find next spring a 3/8 X 20' chain we lost off the front of the tractor that we were using to pull out the stuck tractor where we were breaking 50 acres of expired CRP ground. Ross
 
Lots of parts, pieces of carpet for some reason, several of those black rubber things for milkers that go on the teats, bones and antlers, bottles and cans, chain, grapefruit size rock by the thousand...but not the x-tra large Craftsman screw driver that I used to pry open the rock trap with, and then forgot. :(
 

My billfold a year after I lost it. I just happened to look down while disking a 20 acre field and there it was. The draft card and drivers license were paper so they didn't fare so well. Rest of the billfold looked pretty good.
 
I found a whole car. Doesn't count cause it was just off the field. Kept coming up with parts until I stopped digging. The rest is down there somewhere. Sent the block for scrap. Last thing I dug up was the crankshaft. Early 1960's model Buick if I remember.
 
Found those too ! Black rubber thing for milking, one hanging in the garage, you can't tell it was in one of our fields, and there was a name on it too.
 
I live in a flood plain. Johnstown floods of 1889, 1936, 1972, 1977 have all left a lot of interesting stuff in the fields. Mostly junk metal but occasionally we find something neat. Lots of arrowheads as we are close to where there was a huge indian settlement.
 
Found the usual horse harness pieces and the old drill chains with the round ring for covering, pieces of very ornate glass, weather balloon, and a gold wedding band...not mine.
 
Found two Claymore mines. While looking for a spot. To set up my motor pool at Ft Hood. I thought they were training aids. Just to be safe called EOD. Shorts turned brown when they blew both of them up. After showing me the trip wire I almost hit.Other than that just the normal junk.
 
The usual stones, tools, junk. The missing beater blades off the spreader. Fence posts, wire. Tillage parts. A few months ago my brother found a piece of the fast hitch latch from the 706, that's been missing longer then I been around. My pa says there's a entire plow bottom out in the fields somewhere. Been a long time since any arrowheads were found.
 
Nothing but junk pieces of oId machinery and pieces of chain and antIers, the antIers come usuaIIy with a price tag in fIat tires and broken guards and knife sections.
I did Iose pIenty tooIs over the years,..I never found any back.
 
This fall I saw a hunting knife in a rented field we were working. Told my son who was riding along to get out of the cab and get it so we wouldn't catch a flat tire. He decided that the right thing to do was to give it to the landlord and ask if it was his. Landlord took it and said thanks, thought maybe it was one of his sons'. Apparently his wife laid into him about taking a "treasure" from my little boy and went off on him about how things she found as a kid had meant so much to her. He said he'd give it back to my boy. Then he forgot about it and lost the knife. She went out and bought one similar to it and gave it to my son (turned out it was the day after his birthday by the time this happened). Made both of their day's.
 
I was fixing fence one time and laid my hammer on the stone wall. Reached without looking to pick up and it felt funny in my hand. I looked at it and the wooden handle was all weathered and rough. The one I"d been using was on another rock. The one I picked up I had left there two years before.
 
Several yr. ago, an oil co. wanted to buy some clay to build A road to A well location. After they finish, he said they would build me A pond. They came back in A few weeks with two dozers and A trackhoe. Got it fix good.

A few weeks later it came A big rain, I walk across the dam. I found A old pocket watch on top of the dam. It had been push around several times, but the dozer track never hit it.

Hammer Man
 
Back in the 50s on some land my cousins owned before they sold it to us in 1967, their hired hand found a skull breaking sod. They were guessing they dug up a shallow Indian grave with the plow.
 
Yea, Same here! Found about 100' of steel cable with the 3 bottom this fall though, plowing new ground. Looks like an old guy wire, etc. Usual glass bits, a few arrowheads now and again along the creek. About 88 found a nice brassier hanging on creek fence by the swimming hole... figured my best bet was to go to the house.

Mac
 
My brush mower seems to find all sorts of stuff.
Mowing for the neighbor I found a T post that had been snapped off about 6" above the ground. Missed the tires, but made a hack of a noise when it went under the brush mower.
A length of barbed wire with the mower.
A Hog panel with the mower.
The funniest thing I ever found was when I was a kid. I would go around and plow big gardens for people with a two bottom spinner plow on a Ford NAA. One day it started pulling kind of hard and I kicked up the throttle a little and kept going. After about a hundred feet it got a little tougher and I looked behind me and saw about a hundred feet of black pipe being turned into a big cork screw looking thing behind me. My first thought was "Oh No, what have I done". Went and got the property owner and we never did figure out what it was for. Apparently whatever it was abandoned long ago and was no longer in use.

Greg
 
Shopping Cart. Found it stuck in the last furrow of the plow. Interesting time getting it unstuck with tools that were in the tractor toolbox. Inlaws ran some land in the city that was surrounded on three side by subdivision backyards. Lots of stuff came over the fence. Shopping cart was disguised in an otherwise nice stand of red clover we were plowing down.
 
A truck. I did a lot of plowing after dark when much younger. One would-be nice rectangular field had a big concave on one side. One night I decided to move whatever was in that clump of weeds and square up that field. I lifted and strained and rolled whatever that was and made the field rectangular. Passed the field a few days later with dad in the passenger seat of the pickup and he said: "Wonder what ever happened to that old truck that set in that field ?" I just drove on.
 
Well, letsee... disk blades, broken plow shares, some from plows before my time (68 years), couple of hunting knives, several arrows, unfired shotgun shells, fired brass from guns (not mine), lug wrench from '47 JD B - lost for about 55 years, grease gun lost for 5 years... Arrowhead, various horse harness hardware. Set of mis-matched shed antlers (know from same deer, saw him the fall before). Several unmentionables, (so I won't mention them!)
 
Billy,
Back in the early 90s, I was working on a construction site down at Casilton on the Hudson, Catholic nusing home. We were digging the final haunches for the footings in that very solid gray clay, prevelent down there. We had a specially built 3' wide straight edge bucket with a single 8" wide tooth in the center to form a key slot in the clay mounted to a large Kobelco trackhoe. Part way across the lower haunch, we brought up a really big leg bone out of the clay. We stopped digging and our trackhoe operator and his ditch man, our forman, our site truck driver, and the site superintendant, and me, were the only ones to see it. I was on the dozer grading the spoils in the dump site. It was loaded on the site truck and transported to where I was grading the fill zone. If word got out, probably the whole project would have gotten shut down to look for more bones.
That clay was so tight that when the backhoe tooth peeled out the key slot, it rolled spyrolls like big truck tires out that didn't break apart.
Loren
 
I ran new water lines and hydrants a few years back. I found three one inch lines running from the cistern to the house and then found a HIGH voltage burried power line. The oil companies had wells all over this farm and the burried lines that went to them. The power was off but it was quite a shock to see that come up in front of the skid steer. I did go check all of the sheds to make sure everything worked, even though I know all of our power lines are overhead. It just made me feel better.
 
I hear you on that one. I was using my flail mower. and picked a long piece of wire. It was such a mess I had to take it home, and take the thing apart to remove the mess. Lost almost a day on that one. Stan
 
I forgot about the tent stake. One time we went out to pick corn picked up a tent stake someplace. The thing jammed between the husking rolls (its still there). that was the last time the picker was used for that reason.
 
That is an odd one, if it was undisturbed soil, whatever it was had to be real old, maybe it was fossilized ? In NYC when that sort of thing happens, it becomes an indefinite work stoppage.

I've never seen anything like that when I did that kind of work. I do remember finding rubble from the local quarry, that we used on culvert aprons, that had fossils in it, wish I saved one of those, might even still be there where we put that culvert in. It was the scalloped or corrugated looking shell, 6" blue colored stone rubble, which came out of the mountain that is all but about gone now, over in Grafton NY. That kind of clay is something isn't it? Looks like could make bricks or ceramic with it. I've seen some of that blue clay over in the underside of the G.E. landfill in Waterford NY, now the Momentive plant. Must be a near the river geological thing. Castleton and points south along that area was always a fun place to travel, was always lots to seem be it old junk, homes or old farms etc, more so if you head east from the valley a bit.
 
In the 60's used to find a lot of "chaff". Not the wheat chaff, but shredded aluminum foil dropped from USAF planes to test radar functions in bases up near the Canadian border.
 
I guess I'm missing something on that one also.

I do know that the farmer dad bought corn from this fall is gonna find one of my 5/16 grade 70 chains that I had on the front of the tractor while chopping. It was there until I needed it to get pulled out again after dropping the tractor through some ice.

No idea where it went,I looked the field over as good as I could while driving along, but it was dark and I was very, very cold.

Donovan from Wisconsin
 
Harvard University did an archeology dig on the farm that was my Mom's family. We still occasionally find pieces of pottery or arrow heads. On the home farm I've found all kinds of plow pieces and sometimes pieces of harness. I found about half a roll of woven wire that my Dad left, unfortunately I found it with a bushog.
 
Saw a bunch of that foil here too. Found a couple released baloons, one from a Sunday school in Chicago. Answered their card, never got a response. Found a smiley baloon escaped from Wally land one time. Freaked out my llama when it got caught in the fence. (Central Michigan).
 
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