DETECTORIST UNEARTHS FREEDMAN’S BADGE

A couple of weeks ago at a Starbucks in Fort Mill, John Kraljevich was joined by a man with something to sell.

The man had recently procured a precious relic from a friend. It was an oval badge made of copper with a small hole at the top to accommodate a string or ribbon. The string was missing, of course, and the hole was packed with hardened dirt because the item had spent more than 200 years underground.

Kraljevich noticed the word “FREE” embossed upon an image of a liberty cap on a pole. Along the edge were the partially abraded words “CITY OF CHARLESTON” and etched beneath the Phrygian cap was the number 147. Freedman’s badges were made for free Black people in Charleston in the late 1700s, all were required by law to register with the Office of the City Clerk and obtain a badge, for which they paid 5 shillings.

Kraljevich, a collector who trades in rare coins and metals and operates John Kraljevich Americana, was familiar with this item (he has another just like it in his collection), and he did not hesitate to purchase the badge. It is likely worth the price of a very good car, he said, declining to offer specifics.

Who unearthed it?

Ralph Fields, a Myrtle Beach resident and metal detectorist, was out with his equipment on Feb. 28 — somewhere on the Cainhoy peninsula just north of Mount Pleasant, and within the city of Charleston — scanning the grounds of a construction site for interesting objects when the clicks and whistles indicated he had located something.

He was part of a group of 25 or so with permission to scan the grounds in an area known for its antebellum history, he said.

After a couple days of uneventful searching, Fields was ready to go home, he said. But he showed up that Sunday for one last pass, planning to remain on site only for a couple of hours.

Turns out it was time well spent.

He left the group to focus on a flat area near a new road bed, probably where a house was to be built. He found the top half of a British button that dated to the Revolutionary War. Then his machine detected a lot of iron underground, along with something else. A coin perhaps?

He dug no more than 4 inches and pulled out the badge. He had seen slave badges before, which were distributed to enslaved people hired out by their masters to do limited work. But he’d only heard about the elusive freedman’s badge.

“In my head, that’s my holy grail,” Fields said. “It’s a lightning strike. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime find.”

Kraljevich, who once worked as a historical interpreter at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in Virginia, and who has long had an interest in African American and antebellum history, is certain that many historical artifacts are getting bulldozed and buried, or drowned in nearby waters. So it’s especially thrilling to secure a freedman’s badge.

“These are the most important objects of the American South in this era,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything that offers more value.”

And until the city has a formal method in place to discover, secure and preserve such artifacts, museum curators, archaeologists and collectors will have to rely on independent relic hunters like Fields.

“Metal detectorists are usually the best chance we have of finding and saving stuff,” Kraljevich said.

To read the complete article, see:
(https://www.postandcourier.com/news/local_state_news/armed-with-metal-detector-myrtle-beach-man-finds-rare-charleston-freedmans-badge/article_d07f1130-a135-11eb-96c3-5f833c066c1b.html)

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