Marshal finds local history relics with hobby

The past is always present, and no one knows that better than Shervonne S. Gallow. After spending a career in law enforcement, including service as a U.S. marshal, she is now spending her days tracking down old relics instead of criminals.

Gallow has become an avid metal detector hunter and loves looking at old properties where people have lived, worked, and played. Public areas around the Sabine River in old downtown Orange, or places in the Old Orange Historic District

"I've always loved history," she said. Discovering dropped coins, tools, jewelry, and souvenirs of travels can teach about life in the past.

Some of those items have been found at a couple of houses on West Cherry Avenue in the Historic District. Sherry and Mike Combs have let Gallow search around their 1910 house.

The spacious, two-story house was built by the Neff family and the late Judge Neff lived there as a boy.

But Gallow thinks somebody else may have had a house or a barn there before because she has found items that date from before 1910.

Also, Gallow has searched by the 1908 Southern Pacific Train Station on Green Avenue and the vacant lot to the east. Both are owned by the non-profit Friends of the Orange Train Depot. Rose Simar, a founder and director of the group is a neighbor of Gallow and gave her permission.

After digging up the buried relics, Gallow is always careful to replace the dirt and sod. Sherry Combs said she can't even tell where the holes were dug in her yard.

One unusual item discovered is a woman's shoe metal heel plate with a heart shape cut-out in the middle. Metal detectors and historians online discuss the significance or meaning of the shoe plate design that dates back to the 1890s.

Some stories are that the heart on the heel signified a "lady of the evening," or prostitute. During the days of unpaved streets, the cutout on the heel would make an imprint in damp dirt or mud. Men looking for companionship could follow the footprints to the woman.

Gallow found the heel plate by Simmons Park between Mill Street near Green Avenue and off Simmons Drive. Mill Street basically was the far east side of Orange until the early 1900s. Then, and later right before World War II, dredging spoils from the Sabine River were used to fill in the area marsh areas that now includes Simmons Drive.

Mill Street got its name because it ended by Nineteenth Century lumber mills along the Sabine River. Did a lady of the evening walk around leaving a trail for love-hungry lumberjacks riding logs down the river or perhaps, mill workers?

Guessing is about all one can do with many of the items Gallow has found and collected. She is always looking for people to share any information they can about some of the relics.

Finds in Orange have included at least three Chinese coins with a couple back to the late 1800s. One was at Cherry Avenue property. Some references to Orange in 1901 have included a Chinese laundry located on Front Street? Perhaps the family owning the laundry had the coins?

Or, Orange has always been a sea-going port town. Did the coins come from someone who came from visiting foreign lands.

Gallow has also found an 1898 coin from The Netherlands. That might be explained by Orange being a port, or maybe from the Dutch immigrants from the country who came in the 1890s and settled in Jefferson County in a what is now named Nederland in their honor.

In the past couple of years since she started the hobby, Gallow has found dozens of coins, some back to the 1800s, some not so old.

The silver-plated spoon found at the site of the old Frances Ann Lutcher Hospital has an easy history. The widow of timber baron Henry J. Lutcher built the hospital as a gift to the city in 1921. It was demolished fifty years later and a nursing home was built at the site between Second and Third Streets and Pine and Elm Avenues. Last year, the abandoned and storm-damaged nursing home building was demolished. It was after that demolition that Gallow found the spoon.

At the Brownwood Park, she found a military peace medal buried under a tree. The medal was authorized by Congress in 1945 to be awarded to everyone in the military during World War II and it originally had a ribbon and pin attached.

She's also found pocket watches buried, including one with a porcelain face. Watch fobs were apparently a popular souvenir or commemorative item. She found one fob embossed with the Wright Brothers first flight, and another one from the 1915 San Francisco world's fair, the Panama-Pacific Exposition.

By the train depot she found a metal hitch that would have been used by the U.S. Cavalry. The Cavalry was using mules in World War I and trains were used to transport them across the country. Did mules stop in Orange?

As any parent for more than a century knows, little metal cars have always been popular. Gallow said the die-cast metal vehicles date back to the 1880s with a brand that became Tootsie Toy in the 1920s. She has found a couple of dozen old cars and trucks, including one under a tree at the Combs property.

She said she offers items back to the property owners, but usually, they tell her to keep them. Sherry Combs said she would have never known the relics were in her yard and they would still be buried.

She has made displays in her home for items, including a jar of marbles, including a rare late 1800s clay marble. The collection has a number of bottles and pieces of china. Though a metal detector will not find those items, she finds them in the same holes where she is digging for metal.

She is open to having a public display of her finds and also accepts invitations to use her equipment and skills on other properties, especially ones with long histories.

Hunting for lost history artifacts isn't the only hunting Gallow has done. At least she doesn't have to worry about the relics fighting back as she did with people she had to track and arrest as a U.S. Marshal.

Gallow is originally from Beaumont. She said she blew her knee out playing basketball at Lamar and decided to join the Army. There, she served in the military police and went on to become a law enforcement officer in Kansas.

After working in the infamous Leavenworth, Kansas, federal prison, she was recruited to join the U.S. Marshal Service.

Eventually, she was transferred to Lake Charles, Louisiana. She said she likes small-town life and decided Orange was a good place to live because it offered her a straight shot on Interstate 10 to get to Lake Charles, plus in the other direction, she was close to her old home.

Though she retired, the marshal service asked her to come back and she still goes to work in Lake Charles federal courts a couple of days a week.

She still has time for her history metal-detecting hobby. And local cops have gotten to know her, too. One is because sometimes officers are called to check a "suspicious" person walking with a metal detector. Another reason is because she caught a neighborhood burglar.

Gallow lives in the Oak Creek Village subdivision in the Little Cypress area. About three years ago, she was outside talking to her neighbor and saw a strange car pull up to her open garage. A lanky man got out and was going into her garage when she went to ask him what he was doing. He walked away, got in the car and it drove away.

She noticed the make and color, along with its paper temporary license tag turned down.

Neighbors on a social media site then began showing security videos of the same man taking things from garages and storage sheds.

A friend of Gallow a few days later called her to tell her she had seen the car go into the parking lot of a business off Interstate 10 not far from Gallow's house.

Gallow said she drove down Meeks Drive to the back of the business. She called Orange police as she waited in her truck watching. When police went up to the driver sitting in the car, she went inside the business.

The tall man she was looking for was standing in a line at the checkout counter, though he didn't have any items to buy. He was standing watching police at the car.

Because of Covid, Gallow had put on a mask with a double purpose of hiding her identity in case he recognized her. She followed him out the store with a pair of handcuffs hiding in her hands.

After calling him to stop for a U.S. Marshal, he turned and was cuffed before he realized what was going on.