Adventure, history draw members of Tri-County Metal Detecting Club
By Ed Runyan
HOWLAND
To three local members of the Tri-County Metal Detecting Club, the hobby of metal detecting appeals to their sense of adventure and desire to help others.
The 21-year-old organization that meets monthly in Cortland has about 100 members, about one-third of them women and several under age 18. Its members come from as far away as Cleveland, Canton, Akron and Columbiana.
They’ve participated in some newsworthy searches in recent years — such as the failed attempt to find a time capsule buried at Niles McKinley High School in 1964 and the successful attempt to locate historical items after the demolition of the grandstands at the Columbiana County Fairgrounds.
The group helped the Hubbard Police Department look for shell casings last year after an officer chased a suspect on foot through backyards, and the suspect turned and fired several shots at the officer. Neighbors apparently picked up the casings, because they were never found, said one club member.
The club welcomes requests from police or others for them to help find any sort of lost item.
Over the years, they’ve successfully found numerous lost pieces of jewelry, including for a Champion Township woman who took off her ring, valued at $3,500, while she was doing yard work and then couldn’t find it.
“We were there about 90 minutes. She was real happy,” said Mike Marsh of Cortland, club secretary.
“We look for items for free — rings, keys, anything metal you lose,” said Jesse James of Cortland, former club president who has been involved in metal detecting for 30 years.
Club president Mike Borosko of Youngstown’s West Side has a display case, as most metal-detecting enthusiasts do, containing items he’s found with his detector, including a Chinese coin dating back to mid-1600s. It also contains old watch fobs, 1900s Indian-head pennies and an 1890 V Nickel.
James, who does look a little like the Confederate-era bandit from the James Gang whose name he shares, said he and his metal detector have found “way over $10,000 worth” of items over the years.
His wife wears a platinum-set flawless diamond ring with two saphires worth $5,500 that he found. “My oldest coin was an 1827 Large Cent,” which is a penny the size of a quarter, James said.
James, Marsh and Borosko said some of the things that most members of the club have in common is a sense of adventure, a love of hunting for a long-forgotten item buried in the earth and an appreciation for history.
Once during a trip to Virginia, James found a Confederate soldier’s hunting knife in a former Confederate camp. “Nobody’s touched it since the 1860s,” James said.
Borosko said one of the joys of metal detecting is taking an interesting find back home and then “doing some research to find out what it is. When you think of the last person who touched it — it could be the early 1900s,” he said.
“Every time you dig something up, it’s like Christmas,” Marsh said, adding that people would be amazed at how much change people lose at places where children go to watch or play sports.
“I always say if parents knew how much money their kids lost, they wouldn’t give them any,” he said. “I can go up behind Lakeview High School every night and find $5” worth of coins.
Borosko, James and Marsh say hobbyists such as they adhere to limits on where they search, such as public land or private property where they have permission, but sometimes hobbyists don’t have to look far to find good hunting grounds.
Said Borosko, “Your own yard is the best place to start. Some of my best finds came from my own yard.”