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A little background information….
I have a small flock of chickens (hens), I run them for the eggs they produce – excess eggs over and beyond what we (wife and I) consume get sold to neighbors, friends, and co-workers. The money we earn from the sale of the excess eggs goes toward paying for feed and other costs of keeping the birds. A couple of weeks ago, I sold some eggs to one of my co-workers, Jack. In the conversion we had about how my birds are doing with the winter cold, etc, Jack asked me "if he had ever told me about the silver coins that he and his wife Jill had found in a chicken coop they had years ago?"
“Huh – what?!” This question got my full and undivided attention.
What follows in the story Jack told me – it took place more than 30 years ago. I have used pseudonyms in the telling, so as to protect the identities of the people involved. I have known and worked with Jack for over 25 years, and have no reason to doubt this telling. The pictures which follow are Jack's. I had/have no involvement in this story other than the telling of it here on Realcent.
In the early ‘80’s, Jack and his wife Jill moved to AAAA, a town located in the upper Midwest. They had lived in town for about a year, then decided that they wanted to raise their kids in a country environment, so they looked for, and subsequently rented the house and building site of a former dairy farm. Among the various building on the farm was a chicken coop, which Jill decided to use, for raising hens for eggs like I do, and broilers for the fry pan. It had been some time since the chicken coop had been cleaned, so the accumulated manure was deep and thick.
Jill started the task of manure removal and a general cleaning of the building. She had been working at this task for about a week, when one morning, she heard a “clink”. “Huh?” She dug a bit more, and subsequently uncovered a glass jar, with a package inside.
As Jack told me, it was the beginning of a perfect storm of events, as Jill’s parents were due to arrive that afternoon, and her father just happened to own a metal detector.
Jack and Jill got the jar opened, and unwrapped the package, which contained U.S. silver coins. Jill’s parents arrived in the afternoon, and were told of the discovery. The coop was long and narrow, with nest boxes and roosts attached to the long walls, above a dirt floor. The droppings from the birds fell and accumulated on the dirt. Jill’s dad put his detector to work – it soon began to show targets, buried in the dirt, beneath the layer of manure. They started digging, and uncovered 3 milk cans, of the style used by dairy farmers 50 or more years ago. The cans contained more jars (3-4 per can), and each jar contained packages of coins.
“Now what? Who owns these?” became the questions of the day…
Jack consulted an attorney. The answer from the attorney was “it’s a gray area”. The original owners of the farm (and presumed owners of the coins) was a married couple who had been killed in a car accident. The couples will left the farm to a nationally known charity. The charity had sold the entire farm (building site and crop land) to an area farmer, who had then rented the building site to Jack and Jill.
The attorney couldn’t say for certain, but his best guess was that if the find was taken to court, the charity would win. Based on this, they sold the coins for the silver value, then sent the charity a check for the proceeds of the sale. The charity in turn, gave them a 10% finders fee.
Pictures follow....
- coop.jpeg (30.83 KiB) Viewed 1192 times
- jill.jpeg (28.73 KiB) Viewed 1192 times
- coins1.jpeg (35.98 KiB) Viewed 1192 times
- coins2.jpeg (24.68 KiB) Viewed 1192 times
JD
