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EDEN — The fish just weren’t biting on May 2.

It was a sticky, hot Sunday afternoon. Jeff Overby, his wife, Jo-Lynn, and his cousin Jerry Chambers were doing what they usually do on weekends, casting their lines in the Dan River from Jeff Overby’s john boat.

They were about to give up, but as they floated near the spot on the edge of Draper where Town Creek spills into the Dan, Jeff Overby cast toward the left bank in shallow water and felt his 20-pound test line grow taut. As he reeled, he knew that the resistance could mean only one thing — he had something large on the other end.

Little did he know that he’d hooked one of the biggest things to come out of the Dan River in more than a century — and it wasn’t a fish.

“We thought it was just a stick,” says Jo-Lynn Overby, who reached out to grab it, hoping to salvage her husband’s Eagle Claw fish hook before tossing the stick back into the water. But when she lifted it, the stick was surprisingly heavy.

“So I just kept pulling it out of the water,” she says.

 “And then, I got to the metal part.”

That’s when she knew that he’d snagged more than a stick. As she raised it from the water, there was a chunk of iron that had been forged into a spearlike point and adhered to the end of a wooden pole.

They looked at the pole, which was around 41/2 feet in length, and the Draper couple made the quick decision to keep it.

“We knew it was probably something old,” says Jeff Overby. The next afternoon, he phoned someone at the Dan River Basin Association and ended up chatting with Mark Bishopric about his find. Bishopric, a member of DRBA and one of the owners of Three Rivers Outfitters, was intrigued and asked Overby to bring it by.

As soon as Bishopric looked at it, he knew that it had to be a pole that propelled a bateau. The vessel, used to haul goods along rivers in the 19th century, was a flat-bottomed boat tapered into a point at each end. It was quite long, usually 58 feet, and boatmen navigated it with poles.

By the dawn of the 20th century, rail lines had become the most efficient way to transport goods, and the bateau became obsolete.

At Bishopric’s urging, North Carolina historian Dr. Lindley Butler, who lives in Reidsville, took a look at the pole.

“It’s a very significant find,” says Butler. “Bateau artifacts are very rare.”

Only a few bateau poles have been found and no bateau artifact has ever been found in North Carolina, he explains.

He suspects that the pole that Jeff Overby found has been on the bottom of the Dan River for 100 years or more.

The pole has been taken to Fort Fisher by members of the state’s Underwater Archaeology Branch, who coincidently were in Eden earlier in June to raise a replica of a bateau that had sunk in the Dan River a few years ago.

According to conservator and archaeologist Nathan Henry, the pole will be placed in a tank filled with polyethylene glycol, which preserves it. The process could take a year or more.

Once the pole has been preserved, the Overbys would like to place it in the Eden Historical Museum as part of a permanent bateau exhibit.

“I really want people to see it,” says Jeff Overby, who has a knack for finding “weird things.”

Growing up in the Draper community of Eden, Overby, 47, says he tramped all over the woods, swam and fished in the Dan, swung on vines and waded in creeks. And he collected things: boxes of arrowheads, chip axes and clay marbles — relics he assumes are from the days when the Saura Indians inhabited the land.

“Mama was always scared to go into my pockets,” says Jeff Overby, who also was fond of green snakes and frogs.

Though he wouldn’t describe himself as a historian, he likes the fact that he can trace his family lineage back to a great-great grandfather who fought in the Confederate Army.

Overby himself spent four years in the 82nd Airborne.

Now a truck driver, he makes time each week to fish the Dan River, usually with his wife and their 4-year-old daughter, Jordan.

In the future, they may do more than fishing. When the river’s water levels drop, the Overbys plan to return to the spot where they found the pole to see what other treasures might lurk beneath the murky waters of the Dan.

Contact Myla Barnhardt at 627-1781, Ext. 116, or myla.barnhardt@news-record.com