It’s every kid’s wildest dream – finding buried treasure in their own backyard. There’s a man in southern Wisconsin who is living that dream and has even made a business out of it. Jim Winter calls himself “The Driftless Digger” – and he’s a “detectorist.” That’s someone whose hobby is searching for underground artifacts using a metal detector. You might be familiar with the term thanks to the gentle British comedy Detectorists.
For the latest Under Rocks podcast, we sent our team out with The Driftless Digger to explore the site of an Ogle County farmhouse that was abandoned in the 1920s.
Jim used to call himself a treasure hunter. Now he considers himself a “history saver,” because that’s what really interests him most in the sites he explores: The lives of the people who lived there, their everyday artifacts, and sharing their stories with the landowners.
