Have you ever been on a treasure hunt?

One field in northern Lawrence County was supposedly a popular destination for treasure-hunting Indians in the early 20th century.

Past Lawrence County Historical Society president Bill Alexander described Seneca Field as an “abandoned field overgrown with sage grass, plum, and cherry trees.” It was just north of Weber City, on what later generations knew as the Tom Hampton Place. But this field, so it was said, contained a secret.

As the legend goes, the field was once a campsite for a band of traveling Seneca Indians. How and why a band of Seneca Indians came to create a campsite in southern Middle Tennessee is not retained in the story. The Seneca are native to the northeast and Canada, and their presence in our county would indicate that they were, indeed, far from home.

These Indians supposedly buried a large cache of gold in this field, in hopes of coming back to the place at a later time to retrieve it.

According to the tale as recounted by Alexander, the Indians never returned for their gold, and as late as the 1920s, fresh holes could be spotted there at sunrise, made by locals searching for the treasure. Indian people also supposedly came from far away to dig in the field.

Whether there was ever gold in Seneca Field is left to speculation. But the fact is, people did once frequently dig holes in the field searching for it.

I (Clint Alley) was reminded of this story while perusing some articles written by my great-uncle Bill Alexander this afternoon. But I first heard the legend from my grandfather Mack Kerr when I was a boy. My grandfather grew up in the vicinity, and he had heard the old story when he was a child. His mother (Bill Alexander’s sister, Florence Alexander Kerr) told him that she remembered seeing the fresh holes which periodically dotted the field in the early 20th century.

A similar buried treasure destination was Ivy Bluff, which was “on the north bank of Buffalo Creek, a few hundred yards below the crossing of Highway 43.” Although not as popular a location for excavation as Seneca Field, strangers also frequently dug holes near Ivy Bluff, searching for long-lost gold.