Shark? Teeth

The best place to find ?ape May diamonds·is west of Cape May ·on Sunset Beach

1. Fossil site

If you are traveling Route 35 between Keyport and Redbank and you have a shovel, screen box, and shoes that can take the water, turn in at Oakhill Road. You will cross two sets of railroad tracks on your way to Middleton-Lincroft Road. If you turn left on Middleton-Lincroft Road and travel about 3/10ths of a mile, you will come to the parking area for the Poricy Park fossil beds. 72,000,000 years ago a shallow ocean covered this area; today [1996] the stream bed of Poricy Brook has exposed a smorgasbord of crustaceous era fossils.

While the nature center requests that no one dig into the bank, fossil collecting in the stream bed is not only allowed but ·as of this writing · encouraged. The most common finds are invertebrates such as plecypods, gastropods, and brachopods, but other treasures such as prehistoric sharks teeth have also been recovered. Prized finds include the pen-shaped guards of beleminitella Americana (an ancient squid-like animal) and the rarely found internal cast of the turitella snails.

Not far from Poricy Park sharks·teeth can be found in abundance at Big Brook which wanders through Marshaltown, Wennonah, Mt. Laurel, and Marlboro. From State Highway 79 North, turn right on to Vandenburg Road and travel 3.3 miles to Hillsdale Road. Turn left on to Hillsdale and in about a half mile, you will come to the parking lot by the Township Park Trail. From here you can follow the trail downstream or wade in the water upstream to the fossil collecting sites. Avoid the silted areas and dig where the stream bottom is hard gravel. In addition to shark? teeth ·some very large, most one inch or less ·fossil finds of fish, turtles, stingrays, crocodiles, mosasaurs, and plesiosaurs have been recovered. The better collection sites are upstream. Be forewarned that much of this area is private property.

New Jersey law allows you to walk and dig in the stream bed to your heart? content, but if you set foot on the bank you are trespassing. If you dig in to the bank, you are vandalizing ·that the law; it is also common courtesy. Fortunately, water levels fluctuate enough according to season and rainfall that enough shallow periods are available to make it easy to comply with these rules and still go after the rare finds. The best time to collect is between June and October. Let me know what you find!

2. Coin beach

The Higlands gold rush began in April, 1948. On that date a lobster man, William Cottrell, along with his father and a couple of friends discovered eight gold coins from the early 1700s on the banks of the Shrewsbury River near the foot of Cedar Street. The New York Times carried the story on April 9. The next day a small army of treasure hunters hit the beach, and over two dozen more coins which proved to Portuguese ?ohannas·were found. The coins, named after Portugal? King John, weighed in at one solid ounce of gold apiece. Twenty-eight were reported found before the excitement died down, but nobody knows how many were quietly pocketed during the fever which left 40 craters ·some as deep as six feet ·along a 300 foot stretch of beach. The coins sold at the time for about $75 apiece but are worth several thousand today.

There is some speculation that the source of the coins might be the frigate, H.M.S. Looe, which sank in the lower end of Sandy Hook Bay in 1744 amid rumors of a vast fortune in gold and silver below decks. If this is the case, there are a lot more than 28 gold coins to be had.

3. Fagan? caves

By the end of 1777, the battle lines of the American Revolution in the Middle Atlantic region were firmly set. The British were in complete control of New York and would remain so throughout the conflict. The Americans had re-captured Philadelphia and would never come close to relinquishing it again.

In between these two armed camps stretched a no-man? land encompassing most of New Jersey and parts of New York State where law and order rested solely in the hands of whatever group could produce the most men at a given location. Along the Jersey coast and in the vast tracts of nearby mosquito-infested swamps and pinelands that had formerly been known as ?muggler? Woods,·this void of law and order was filled by bands of dispossessed Tory partisans armed and sponsored by the British in New York. A few of them were legitimate guerrilla forces, but for the most part they were nothing but a bunch of pinewoods robbers.

The most vicious and murder-prone of these bands of pine robbers was the gang headed by Jacob Fagan and Lewis Fenton. After many crimes, murders, robberies, and other foul deeds, the Fagan Gang was infiltrated by a double agent (see ?ysterious Treasure of Benjamin Dennis,·April, 1995 Lost Treasure) and all but eliminated in a pair of ambushes culminating at Rock Pond in January of 1779. Fagan? body hung in chains on the road to Colt? Neck ?ntil the skeleton fell in pieces to the ground.·Lewis Fenton, who was absent that evening, survived the Rock Pond ambush. Vowing revenge, Fenton later managed to ambush and murder the officer in charge of the militia at Rock Pond, but his days as a leader of a gang of pine robbers were over. He was shot dead while robbing wagons at pistol point soon afterwards. With Fenton? death, the location of the spoils of the gang? three year? worth of robbing, killing, and looting, was lost.

Several locations in Monmouth County have been suggested as possible cache points by treasure researchers investigating this gang. Most of them center around the area of Jerseyville and Farmingdale. The Our House Tavern at Shack? Corner near Jerseyville was a known meeting place for the pine robbers. It is thought that some of their loot might be cached on the grounds as well as at the cave one mile south of the Our House, frequented by Lewis Fenton.

4. Moody? rock

James Moody was a ?carlet Pimpernel·type of pine robber who was some times the well-respected Lt. James Moody of Cortland Skinner? Tory brigade of New Jersey volunteers and sometimes the hated bandit Bonnell Moody, who terrorized the prominent Whigs in and around Sussex County, N.J. When in his guise as Bonnell Moody, he and his bandits were twice nearly captured after stealing large amounts of silver plate. In both cases the bandits fled in such haste that pursuers found their camp fires still burning and, in one case, the bread was still warm. But the heavy plate silver was not recovered, giving rise to the opinion that it had almost certainly already been buried. Part of the treasure is thought to be hidden near a natural rock formation two miles south of the city of Newton in Sussex County between the Muckshaw Ponds that has been known since Revolutionary times as Moody? Rock.

The key that was taken from the Sussex County jail when Moody and his men released all the prisoners there during one of their raids was found in the hills north of the city of Newton, and it is speculated that Moody may have had a hideout to the north of Newton as well.

5. Henry Roller? cache

5Henry Roller, a farmer from Folsom in Atlantic County, was known to have kept a large amount of money in his home. In 1915, as his health began to fail, relatives convinced him his money would be safer in a bank. Henry agreed and gathered up his money and took it to the bank. Unfortunately, he arrived too late in the day to make a deposit. Henry returned home and, before he could get back to the bank, he was taken by an illness from which he never recovered. After his death relatives searched the house but could find no sign of Henry? money. They concluded that Henry, having taken to heart their warnings about the danger of keeping so much money in the house, had buried the money somewhere on the property after his return from the bank. A search was made, but Henry Roller? cache has never been found.

Please Note: It is the responsibility of the treasure hunter to gain permission before detecting.

SOURCES:

New Jersey Archives, Series 2, Vols 4 & 5 ·Documents relating to the American Revolution.

Terry, Thomas P. U.S. Treasure Atlas. Specialty Publications, 1985.

Stepanski, Scott and Careene Snow. Gem Trails of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Gem Guidebooks Co., 1996.

Voynick, Stephen M. The Mid-Atlantic Treasure Coast. Middle Atlantic Press, 1984.