Nearly three years ago, using the metal detector his wife had given him for Christmas, Leon Dykes of Orangeburg discovered something curious in his yard.
“The detector started going off,” he said, “so I began digging in that spot.”
Dykes said he soon saw a “little metal tube sticking up.” The tube was broken open, and in it was a document wrapped in heavy yellow plastic and an old coin.
“I didn’t think nothing of it,” he said. “I just took it, put it in a frame and put in on the wall.”
Fast-forward to last year, when he and S.C. Department of Corrections co-worker Donald Stokes, also of Orangeburg, began talking about old coins and, ultimately, Dykes’ unusual find.
Since then, the pair have been trying to discover the history behind what they believe is an original, signed and dated version of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and a Confederate coin dating back to 1861.
“I did research on the property where he (Dykes) lives,” Stokes said, “and found out it used to be an old Confederate campsite during the Civil War and a Union campsite after the war.”
They have taken the document and coin to the Orangeburg County Historical Society, a professor at the University of South Carolina, a collector in Virginia and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., receiving mixed reactions along the way.
“We just want to find out if it’s original, if there’s anything to it,” Stokes said, adding that while half of them said there was nothing to it, a carbon dating test was never performed on the seemingly old piece of parchment paper.
Stokes also conducted research on the Gettysburg Address and said he found that five copies of the document were made, none of which are dated and signed. He said they are also on two pieces of paper, and Dykes’ copy is on only one, just like the one Lincoln allegedly pulled out of his pocket, unfolded and read at the ceremony on Nov. 19, 1863. Stokes said the fact that Dykes’ document bears editing marks makes it that much more believable.
The coin also has a history, as Stokes claims he found out that five Confederate coins were made out of silver and 500 were hand-pressed out of white pot metal in Louisiana.
When a friend took the find to Virginia, the specialist said he couldn’t figure it out, but the Library of Congress said the two pieces don’t have any monetary value.
“It seems that everybody’s given us the run-around on it,” Stokes said. “If they made so many of them (the coins), why would someone go through the trouble of burying it?”
They just want answers.
“It could just be a conversational piece,” Dykes said, “or it could be something.
“We just want somebody to look at it.”