Legends of Fire Island Beach and the South Side

by Edward R. Shaw

THE MINERAL-ROD

John was a hand in the paper-mill at Islip in the twenties. The old mill is still standing in the western part of the village, near the road. One might almost touch it with the whip when driving by. It represents something of the Islip of the twenties which was far different from the Islip of to-day—a quiet, steady-going village, with no incoming of summer residents, and no flutter of gay summer life. A few sportsmen made their way thither in the season, but it was a hard day’s stage ride from South Ferry and too far away to attract even one or two of the many who were accustomed to leave New York during the summer. It was a quiet, steady-going place, and John was a quiet, steady-going hand, working in the mill every day. He had worked there several years with apparently no thought of doing anything else. He liked the place. The merry rumble, the cool moist air always prevalent, the stream always rushing underneath turning the wheels, and ever slipping on down the creek and spreading out into the broad bay. And the tons and tons of paper that were made and kept going off somewhere John took great pride in.

But one morning John went to his work in the mill with his mind no little disturbed. Nothing had happened out of the ordinary. His folks were all well and had gone about their work that morning in the usual way, with no apprehension of the idea absorbing his thought. He alone was disturbed. It was plain to see at the mill that his mind was preoccupied. He talked little. He did not so much as whistle once in going up and down stairs about his work that day. In the night he had had a singular dream, and he thought it over and over all day. When he left the mill at sundown, he had determined that if he should dream the same thing again he would prove the dream.

Several days passed and the impression on his mind had somehow lost its force.

But just a week later to the night, he dreamed again very vividly that at the Point of Woods there was treasure buried between the west end of the woods and the hills which flank the ocean.

The next day he narrated all the particulars of his dream to an intimate friend, Peter by name; and telling him further that as this was the second time he had dreamed the same thing he purposed to get a mineral-rod, go on the Beach, and search over that spot of ground.

Pete’s imagination became inflamed also, and he agreed to go with him.

But where was a mineral-rod to be got, or who knew how the magical thing was to be made? If one had a mineral-rod, it was an easy matter to hold it with both hands and walk over ground in which gold or silver was buried. When one came with it near a place where precious metal was hidden, tradition had always asserted that the rod would bend and twist in one’s hands and point toward the place of concealment; and such was the mystic attraction between any mass of gold or silver coin and the rod, that no matter how firmly held it would bend down straight when directly over any spot where money was buried.

John knew further from common tradition that this rod was always a crotch cut from a witchhazel bush. But just what additions or modifications were connected with it he had never heard.

He sought out, therefore, the oldest men and talked with them about buried treasure and mineral-rods, and in this way came upon more minute information. He followed up every clew, and at last heard of an old crone living in the middle of the Island who knew how mineral-rods were made, and who in her younger days had used one—proving its power, by holding one in her hands and traversing the garden to find some silver coins which had been concealed there as a test, detecting them at last hid in a cabbage-head.