This Just In

An independent man’s quest for lost treasure

Detecting

By ARIN GREENWOOD | August 29, 2007

Howard Hewitt

Howard Hewitt is a compact, bearded, muscular man, who, when the weather is right spends 40 or so hours a week hauling around metal detectors, shovels, and large vanilla ice coffees from Dunkin’ Donuts, looking for valuable little things that people don’t even realize they’ve lost.

He treasure hunts in places like old houses, parks, beaches, woods, school grounds, construction sites, country club grounds, and dumps. On this day, at a shady picnic spot around the former Hunt’s Mill, near Ten Mile River in East Providence's Rumford neighborhood, Hewitt has been pulling up a lot of bottle caps. He’s pretty sure the area has been cleared of good finds, and all that’s left are Pepsi cans. Still, when the metal detector makes promising noises, Hewitt gets down on the ground with his shovel. He digs a neat hole in the ground (it’s all this digging that makes him so muscular), runs his detector over the hole, and elicits a beep.

“I like this dirt,” he says excitedly, running it through his fingers. “Not too alkaline. Whatever this is, it’ll be in good shape.” Howard finally pulls out a tiny coin, penny-sized. He cleans it with his fingernail until we can see the date: 1898. It looks Russian, says Hewitt. He has ideas how it got here: immigrant mill workers having a lunch break; travelers who’d had a picnic near the Blackstone River. Anyway, it’s a lovely coin.

Hewitt grew up in rural Berkley, Massachusetts. He started treasure hunting when he was seven and dug up a glass bottle underneath a backyard apple tree. Now 44, Hewitt does odd jobs and works as church sexton (“glorified janitor,” he says) at St. Martin's Church in Providence. Mostly, he’s out poking around old houses and wandering through dump sites, digging up old bottles, diamond stick pins, gold spectacles, glass Indian trading beads, bone-handled lances, hand-carved ivory dice, Victorian-era engagement rings, a cast for molding musket balls, a silver pen, and many, many coins.

Hewitt shares his East Providence house with his girlfriend Shelby — who found him while she was out metal detecting. The house has shelves and shelves of history books (as well as detective novels and books on frugal living). Treasure hunters are into history; they have to know it to understand the value of their finding. These searchers see an Indian trading bead in that broken piece of glass; people who don’t know history just see trash.

Treasure hunters are independent people who want to figure history out and preserve it before development cements it over. Hewitt says there are around 300 of these folks in Rhode Island. There is a related club — Discoverin’ Rhode Island Treasures.

He believes that uncovering and preserving these broken fragments of the past is about self-preservation, too. Take the 1887 silver franc on a chain around Hewitt’s neck. He found the coin, on a farm in Rehoboth, Massachusetts. The hole was already in it. When Howard picked it up, he knew: it had been worn by a poor farmer who knew that his family would never starve so long as he had the coin, which would have bought two weeks’ worth of groceries in the late 1800s.

Then one day, after a hard week of work, the coin fell off the farmer’s neck. The coin was pushed into the ground over the next 100 years, undisturbed until Hewitt found it. Hewitt wears it now to remind himself that as long as he can find other people’s lost treasures, he’ll never starve.

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