Free Republic

PENFIELD, Pa. — In the heart of Pennsylvania elk country, Eric McCarthy and his client, Don Reichel, got up before sunrise to scour the forest floor for so-called “brown gold” — a rack of freshly shed antlers to add to Reichel’s collection back home. One hill over, a team of FBI agents was also hunting for gold. The metallic yellow kind. The FBI’s highly unusual search for buried Civil War-era treasure more than five years ago set in motion a dispute over what, if anything, the agency unearthed and an ongoing legal battle over key records. There’s so much intrigue...

An FBI agent applied for a federal warrant in 2018 to seize a fabled cache of U.S. government gold he said was “stolen during the Civil War” and hidden in a Pennsylvania cave, saying the state might take the gold for itself if the feds asked for permission, according to court documents unsealed Thursday.

A Harrisburg attorney said Thursday that a state appeals court has just given him the next clue toward hopefully solving the mystery of whether the FBI dug up a cache of lost Civil War gold worth about $400 million from a remote Pennsylvania forest nearly three years ago. That clue, William J. Cluck said, is the name of the federal magistrate judge who ordered all records of the March 2018 excavation in the Dent’s Run area of Elk County to be sealed from public view. Cluck said he can use that information, secured through his latest Right-to-Know Law appeal to...

This is a rather odd story that I’ve been following for a while now, so bear with me. It’s been featured on a couple of the Travel Channel’s conspiracy theory shows and you’ll see why in a moment if you’re not familiar with it. But a recent development may bring it out of the tinfoil hat column and at least into the realm of possibility. The tale starts in the 1860s when legend has it that a large wagon full of gold bullion was either stolen or “went missing” in a remote area of western Pennsylvania. The shipment had supposedly...

Go for the gold? The U.S. government went for it. FBI agents were looking for an extremely valuable cache of fabled Civil War-era gold — possibly tons of it — when they excavated a remote woodland site in Pennsylvania three years ago this month, according to government emails and other recently released documents in the case. On March 13, 2018, treasure hunters led the FBI to Dent’s Run, about 135 miles (220 kilometers) northeast of Pittsburgh, where legend has it an 1863 shipment of Union gold was either lost or stolen on its way to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia....

The FBI came out empty handed at the remote Pennsylvania site where Civil War-era gold treasure is rumored to be buried, officials said Monday. Dozens of FBI agents, Pennsylvania state officials and members of a treasure-hunting group dug in a rural site where local lore has it that a Civil War-era gold shipment bound for a U.S. Mint in Philadelphia was either lost or hidden around the time of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. President Abraham Lincoln reportedly ordered the shipment to pay Union Army soldiers, according to a local treasure-hunting group called Finders Keepers.The FBI said it conducted...

As a 155-year-old legend goes, a Union Army wagon train left Wheeling, W.Va., before the Battle of Gettysburg, carrying two tons of gold, but never completed its 400-mile mission. The gold was supposed to be used to pay Union soldiers. But it first had to make it to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, according to the Associated Press. It never did. The wagon train traveled northeast and was last spotted in St. Marys, Pa. Searchers found the wagons and the bodies of dead soldiers — and the gold was gone. But maybe not forever. On Friday, dozens of FBI agents,...

Has $55million worth of lost gold from the Civil War era been found in central Pennsylvania? That's what locals seem to believe after FBI agents, Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and treasure hunters Dennis and Kem Parada were seen digging around a remote area in Benezette Township, called Dents Run. Dennis and his son Kem, the owners of the treasure hunting organization Finders Keepers, have claimed for years that 52 gold bars were buried under a fire pit at Dents Run more than 150 years ago during the Battle of Gettysburg.

When Sgt. Jim Connors tipped back a few too many, he’d talk about the legend of lost Civil War gold, and boast about its whereabouts deep in the hills of Western Pennsylvania. Connors, according to a 1978 United Press International article in the Pittsburgh Press, was part of a special Union detachment tasked with transporting 26 gold bars, each weighing 50 pounds, from West Virginia to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia in the summer of 1863.According to one version of the story, Connors staggered into Lock Haven, in north-central Pennsylvania, as the lone survivor of an ambush. The gold was...