About This Artifact
A two-inch brass buckle was the only object recovered from the bottom of one of two thirty-foot shafts that Fred Nolan sank on his property in 1963 and 1964. Nolan had drawn lines through the arrowhead-shaped triangle of stone piles just outside his eastern boundary and through two ring bolts set in granite boulders on his land, and chose the shaft positions where those lines intersected, expecting one of them to mark a treasure location. Using a six-man crew he reached thirty feet in both shafts without finding a vault. Crooker quotes Nolan on the buckle: he asked where it had come from and offered no answer beyond hoping that time would tell. No description of the buckle's form, no dating, and no later analysis are recorded in Crooker's account. A buckle of this size could have come from a belt, a shoe, or harness and could belong to any period from the eighteenth century onward; without examination nothing more can be said. The find is one of the few objects recovered from Nolan's early shafts and predates his 1969 draining of the swamp.
Historical Context
William S. Crooker, Oak Island Gold (1993), chapter 21
Where It Was Found
Found at Bottom of one of two thirty-foot shafts on Nolan's property, positioned at intersections of lines drawn through the stone piles and ring bolts. Location: Oak Island, Nova Scotia, Canada.
