While detecting on a farm that I work on in South East Pennsylvania, I dug up this relic with my daughter. At first we thought that it was a a tool hook/hanger for on the side of a wagon (we found a lot of old horses drawn wagon parts in the vicinity. After cleaning it up a little we realized it was something different. I asked a friend of mine who has a lot more experience in identifying relics, but he was stumped too. So I decided to ask a couple groups on Facebook, after just a few minutes I thought that this was not a good idea, because I was getting all kids of crazy answers. Then on guy said “it’s a candle holder” I said that I wasn’t seeing a candle holder and thanked him for his input. He asked “is there any mines in the areas?” I replied that there was a ton of old iron ore mines around. He told me to Google “mining candle holder.” I did and realized that I had a hand forged mining candle holder. The cool thing is that my great grandfather great x 2 grandfather and great x 3 grandfather were all blacksmiths in the are... so there’s a good chance that one of my ancestors made it.

By: Nathan B. Browse Garrett Ace 400 Metal Detectors