Often, detectorists tend to view tot lots as a place to search for easy clad, and perhaps on a rare occasion, a gold ring that some mother lost while watching her children as well as an occasional piece of childrens’ jewelry. The reality is that anything is possible in a tot lot.
I remember on one occasion several years ago, I had received a Garrett GTA 500 metal detector for my birthday. My birthday is in December and that winter was really cold with a lot of snow. Anxious to try my metal detector out, I took it with me when my family went to a hilly park to go snow sledding. I figured there might be a way for me to find something.
While my family went sledding, I metal detected in the snow, looking for recently lost coins. I really wasn’t finding anything in the snow and the patches of ground that weren’t covered with snow were frozen over. Too frozen to bother with trying to dig anything. That left me with the tot lot to search. Though frozen below about 4 inches, there was at least the top 4 inches that I could manage to dig through with a little effort.
After searching most of the tot lot, I managed to pull a few coins and had to pass over several that were in the frozen layer. As I came back around to the other side of the swing set, I pulled out a dime. No big deal, right? Well, this wasn’t just any clad dime. It was a silver dime. My very first silver coin in fact. Believe it or not, I actually found a 1909 worn Barber dime in a gravelly tot lot in a park that was not that old. Some kid must have got into his parents coin collection and then lost it or perhaps the gravel was brought in from some older place.
It has now been many years, but I still have that first silver coin that I found. Just remember, kids are capable of losing a variety of items, including some silver now and then. As a result, some good items can and do show up in tot lots.