A while back I spent more than a few years working as a sawyer in a saw mill in upstate Pa. Never found a flint lock but did run into more than one horse shoe deeply embedded in a log. Also cut into rail road spikes, ceramic electric fence insulators, oodles of bullets and many of the 3 bladed broad heads of the style used back in the 50-60s. The hollow logs were often full of old acorns and dried leaves but we occasionally found animal skeletons, usually squirrels but also raccoons. Even sawed a live 5' black snake in half! My idle hope was to find a stash of old coins. The old fellow who taught me to saw recounted a story of finding what was left of an old Winchester in a log.
Logs with metal embedded in them will usually have a gun metal blue stain showing in the cut end, but not always. The wire fence insulators were the worse. The nails used to mount them on the tree are very hard and will ruin an $8000+ head saw in a flash. If a log came into the mill with a blue stain on the butt I would run it past the saw without cutting and the mill crew would roll it out the other end of the mill. We were allowed to cut it up for fire wood for our own use as long as we did it on our own time and with our own saw. I once cut up an 8 foot white oak log that was about 2 foot in diameter with a blue stain deep in the center of the heart wood. Took it home and split it up, exposing metal in one of the chunks that looked to be the end of a rail road spike. The next winter I tossed the piece into the wood stove and later found a very big horse shoe sitting in the ashes. That tree was over 100 years old.
John
Logs with metal embedded in them will usually have a gun metal blue stain showing in the cut end, but not always. The wire fence insulators were the worse. The nails used to mount them on the tree are very hard and will ruin an $8000+ head saw in a flash. If a log came into the mill with a blue stain on the butt I would run it past the saw without cutting and the mill crew would roll it out the other end of the mill. We were allowed to cut it up for fire wood for our own use as long as we did it on our own time and with our own saw. I once cut up an 8 foot white oak log that was about 2 foot in diameter with a blue stain deep in the center of the heart wood. Took it home and split it up, exposing metal in one of the chunks that looked to be the end of a rail road spike. The next winter I tossed the piece into the wood stove and later found a very big horse shoe sitting in the ashes. That tree was over 100 years old.
John
