Modern day treasure hunters: This group of Kentuckians unearths history, gold in hunts

For Jared Handley and Zeb Hargis, finding buried treasure in Kentucky starts just like it does in the movies.

You need a map.

This is less about “X marks the spot" and more about using the clues cartographers have left behind to show where the earliest Kentuckians once lived. Whole communities and neighborhoods have disappeared over time, but traces of them linger on quietly beneath the ground. By crossing the information on topographical maps with images from Google Earth, Handley and Hargis can suss out the best places to start looking for buried treasure.

Over the years they’ve unearthed gold jewelry so old it’s not stamped with a karat measurement. They’ve uncovered Civil War-era buttons, bullets, and once, even a whole cannonball.

By the time I sat down to talk with the digging duo, more than six years had passed since Hargis founded the Kentucky Dirt Diggers Facebook page. In that time, the digging social network had ballooned to 2,300 members and fostered a statewide community of diggers, his YouTube page garnered thousands of page views, and hobbyists worldwide tuned in to learn his techniques and see his latest finds.

Treasures come in all shapes and sizes, and while the bounty is impressive, for these diggers, it’s not about the profit. Hargis and Handley have never sold anything they’ve pulled from the ground.

The hours they spent sifting through the soil are all about the hunt.

“Do you ever think about the people who lived here and used these things?” I asked them.

“All the time,” Hargis told me.

“You’re picking something up that hasn't been touched since the person in the 1800s dropped,” Handley said. “To me, that's just super cool.”

Finding trash versus treasure with Kentucky Dirt Diggers

Finding a place to hunt doesn’t mean you have permission to just start digging. While historical maps can point you in the right direction, that doesn’t you can dig a hundred or so holes on private property.

So when Handley and Hargis select a site, they knock on doors with a clean-cut appearance, a kind attitude, and business cards that explain what they do. They’re overwhelmingly aware they must be good stewards of the land they dig on and their hobby. They’ve run into plenty of landowners over the years who’ve had bad experiences with dirt diggers who trespass and others who don’t clean up after themselves.

Their goal is to leave the land where they dig better than they found it. They refill every hole they dig and often they pick out buckets of trash that have been lodged in the soil.

As with any treasure hunt, there are plenty of twists, turns, and false starts before you find what you’re seeking. There’s a learning curve that comes with the hobby.

Hargis comes by digging naturally. His father is an antique collector, and he had metal detectors and jars full of historical coins when he was a child. As a kid, Hargis used to run the metal detectors up and down his gravel driveway once a year, collecting spare change that had fallen into rocks.

The first home he bought dated back to 1910, and it didn’t take long before he found a Barber dime and silver ring out by the mailbox. So he researched the history of his hometown and surrounding counties, seeking out early settlements and narrowing down some of the best digging spots in the region.

“I got the itch all of the sudden seeing what else is there,” Hargis said.

For Handley, the desire to dig came at a young age, too. The metal detectors listed in holiday catalogs fascinated him. He always wanted one, but it wasn’t until the documentary television show "Meteorite Men" premiered in 2010 that he finally bought one. Fascinated, he studied and paused the screen over and over until he figured out the metal detectors the two main characters used to hunt meteorites: Fischer F-75.

He was thrilled initially, but that excitement, quickly, turned into frustration.

“I knew nothing about metal detecting it,” Handley said, recalling those early hunts. “It was rusty nail, after rusty nail, after rusty nail.”

He didn’t realize, at first, that his machine could discriminate between trash and treasures.

You can practice using metal detectors in “test gardens” that have dimes, nickels, and quarters planted in them at different depths. That’s how you grow to understand what your metal detector is saying to you out in the field. Deciphering the different beeps, codes and nuances dramatically increases your chances of finding something memorable or even valuable.

“You can buy the most expensive machine or you can have the simplest machine, but if you don't learn your machine, you're not going to be productive,” Handley said.

At first, Handley’s goal was simple, he just wanted to dig up an Indian penny. Once he found that, he turned his attention to coins from the 19th century, and vividly remembers pulling his first Barber quarter from the ground. He’s learned that picking out a wheat penny, which were produced in the first half of the 20th century, on a property, is a good omen for older coins that might be hidden deeper in the ground.

Several of the coins they’ve found have holes drilled into them. Often 19th century Kentuckians would wear coins as good luck charms, or they’d sew the money into their clothes for safekeeping.

Handley’s oldest coin is from 1806, but he’s hopeful he’ll eventually dig up something even older.

To be a successful treasure hunter, you need to understand the tools

While coins make up the bulk of their collections, a detector’s beep can pinpoint so much more than coins.

Once Handley found a class ring from a high school in Owensboro. The ring had initials carved into it, and so he went searching through old yearbooks trying to figure out who it had belonged to. Eventually, he tracked down the owner, who’d lost it decades before.

Another time, Handley found a gold ring with two interlocking hearts. The gold was so old, he told me, it hadn’t been stamped with a karat number. He imagines a soldier receiving this trinket from his wife or his sweetheart, but there is no way to know for sure.

Civil War relics are plentiful, too. Hargis’s metal detector beeped over a Civil War-era bullet that had been carved into the shape of a chess rook and a breastplate from a soldier’s belt. His research showed soldiers often discarded this part of their uniform because their enemies could see the reflection from that metal across the woods. A glimmer from a reflection, in the wrong moment, could reveal where troops were hiding.

That breastplate was nearly 18 inches into the ground, Hargis explained. When he started working on that spot, first he found nails and coins, but once those were out of the ground, the metal detector kept beeping, telling him to go deeper.

That happens a lot. It's almost like the tools tease them a little, saying “But wait, there’s more.”

They don’t keep their findings in treasure chests. Each year, Hargis buys a new tacklebox and uses the compartments to separate the different types of coins from things like buttons, skeleton keys, and jewelry. Eventually, Hargis wants to build some display cases in his basement, but he hasn’t gotten around to it yet.

Handley keeps his bounty in shoeboxes, but he takes a different approach. He groups his loot in baggies that are labeled with the coordinates of the site. That way, if he ever wants to go back to a place, he can use what he’s already found as a guide to what else might be there.

And while their findings may not be worthy of a museum or even lucrative enough to change their lifestyle, that’s OK. Digging for this duo isn’t about the monetary value. It’s about holding history in your hands and seeing the smallest reflection of it in the worn, aged metal.

“That Civil War breastplate was literally on the soldier’s chest as he marched,” Hargis said. “He threw that in the fire pit, and it's been there since the 1860s.”

“And it would sit there, to this day, if I didn't go hunt for it.”

Features columnist Maggie Menderski writes about what makes Louisville, Southern Indiana and Kentucky unique, wonderful, and occasionally, a little weird. If you've got something in your family, your town or even your closet that fits that description — she wants to hear from you. Say hello at mmenderski@courier-journal.com or 502-582-4053. Follow along on Instagram and Twitter @MaggieMenderski.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Kentucky Dirt Diggers hunt for buried treasure, unearth KY history