REVOLUTIONARY WAR FRENCH ENCAMPMENT FOUND

 

Relic hunters scouring a farm field south of Fredericksburg, Virginia, were turning up the usual Civil War artifacts when their metal detectors hit something strange. Eleven little buttons emerged from the ground near a creek, with odd mounts on the back and delicate numbers on the front.

Lafayette "Scotty" Crabtree Jr. and Greg Lagasse ran an online image search, and the results were unlike anything they had encountered in a lifetime of hunting for treasure in Virginia.

The buttons were 244 years old, and French.

"What? French?" Crabtree, 71, said through a haze of Pall Mall cigarette smoke, recalling the moment from more than a year ago. Near the buttons, they also discovered Spanish and English coins from the early 1700s.

Crabtree and Lagasse had stumbled onto a find rarer than any Union bullet or Confederate belt buckle: evidence of a French encampment from the Revolutionary War. On this sloping cornfield that has changed little since 1782, French soldiers who helped defeat the British at Yorktown rested on their way to rejoin Gen. George Washington in New York.

"I had to quickly do as much research as I could, pull all the things we had off our shelves and start studying it," said Mike Clem, a regional archaeologist for the Virginia Department of Historic Resources who helped authenticate the site. "This is amazing," added Jonathan Connolly, a state project review archaeologist, who worked at Yorktown earlier in his career.

While the archaeologists lament that Crabtree and Lagasse essentially picked the site clean before it could be studied and surveyed, Clem hopes the discovery of this French encampment holds the key to something even bigger: Finding more of them.

When historians learned about the finds, they quickly connected the site to long-neglected documents at the Library of Congress. The French had meticulously diagrammed individual camp sites but not in a way that lets modern researchers pinpoint them on the broader map. The Virginia discovery solves that problem.

State officials descended on the farm last month to examine the artifacts and search for more.

The French were crucial to the American victory over the British at Yorktown on Oct. 19, 1781 — the last major battle of the war for independence. After the surrender, the French army wintered at Williamsburg before heading back north, uncertain whether the war was really over.

De Rode added that the army operated on borrowed money, so it makes sense that slivers of Spanish coins — known as "pieces of eight" — turned up at the encampment.

To read the complete article, see:
They searched for Civil War artifacts. What they found was older and rarer. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2026/05/25/encampment-french-allies-revolutionary-war-discovered-virginia/)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web