2026 - Back to Our Roots!

 

Get Ready! 2026 is Going to be a Great Year to be a Central Texas Treasure Club Member!

Over the past several months, one recurring thought has kept coming to mind about our Club's future and how to make it brighter and a lot more fun for our Members. As some of you know, when my lifelong friend Friou Allen and I founded our Club in August, 1981, we intended to encompass ALL forms of treasure hunting into it. They include arrowhead hunting, metal detecting for small targets or "coin-shooting" as it was popularly called back then, gold mining, fossils, and especially locating outlaw treasure caches and individual "post-hole" banks where people buried their savings when there were no banks around or when they didn't trust banks for whatever reasons. That's why we named our Club the Central Texas Treasure Club, not just a metal detecting club. Over the decades since our Club's founding, we've gotten away from many of these exciting aspects of treasure hunting. Well, in 2026, I'm going to lead our Club "back to our roots" as we incorporate more of these aspects into our Club Events and Activities!

Over the decades since 1981, I've pursued many of these other pursuits and I've learned a lot about them that I want to share with our Members so you can enjoy them too. I've come to firmly believe that there is more lost and buried treasure right here in Central Texas than there is in any other area of its size in the United States and possibly in the world! We're going to go after some of it in 2026! I've also been formulating some activities for our Members, such as field trips, hosting guest speakers who are experts in these various fields, as well as giving lessons to our Members on gold panning and sluicing, deciphering treasure signs and symbols (which can be found all over Brown County and Central Texas IF you know what to look for), and gaining permissions for our Club to seek out these lost treasures.

I will outline some of these activities at our regular monthly meetings throughout 2026. We'll also be holding Special Fundraising Raffles, every month, to pay for whatever expenses we need to achieve these goals. Our Secretary/Treasurer Jen Evetts will earmark all proceeds from these Special Raffles exclusively for that purpose.

As a result of needing to prepare and organize these exciting activities, I will be leaning on our Officers to do a lot of the other work that I've done in the past. I'll outline what that entails at our next monthly meeting on Tuesday, January 6th.

2026 - CTTC Back to our Roots Year!

Jay Longley, President, Central Texas Treasure Club

Attached are photos of some "old-time" treasure hunters who sought the big treasures and found some.