Man who lost his wedding ring 15 years ago just got a call from a farmer who found it while planting corn

A wedding ring lost on a chilly December day in 2010 has made its way back to its owner, thanks to a meticulous paper trail and a lucky break in the soil. Wayne Corpew of Roanoke, Virginia, was recently reunited with his yellow and white gold wedding band, 15 years after it vanished during a holiday outing at Joe’s Trees in Newport. Corpew had been cutting down a Christmas tree with his family when he noticed the ring was no longer on his finger.

"I went back up to where I dragged the tree to and searched there, but it wasn’t there. The next day, I came back and brought a metal detector. There was snow on the ground, and I spent all day the next day looking for it, and nothing," he told WDBJ. The ring had slipped off sometime during the process of hauling the tree to his truck. Though he searched for hours, first by eye, then with equipment, there was no trace. While his story feels like one in a million, it reflects a far more common pattern. A 2024 survey by Jewelers Mutual found that over half of jewelry owners have lost a precious item like a wedding or engagement ring, often during routine activities. Most of those pieces are never recovered, which made what happened next all the more unlikely.

He informed Sue Bostic, the former owner of Joe’s Trees, who pinned a handwritten note about the missing ring to her bulletin board — a note that would outlive her ownership of the farm. In 2018, Bostic passed the farm down to her nephew Darren Gilreath and his wife Samantha. Along with the land, they inherited years of notes about customer belongings lost across the fields. "She kept notes of everything. We’d always put them on a bulletin board for a couple of years. As the years went on, we gathered them into a stack, hoping one day we’d find a needle in a haystack," Darren said.

That needle finally turned up in June when Samantha noticed something glinting in the dirt while planting corn near the farm’s pumpkin patch. "As I’m planting corn, I’m walking through the rows, and I see this wedding band lying on the top of the ground. So I reached down and picked it up," she said. Darren added that the ring had been buried just inches from the grassline they hadn’t tilled. "The chances of it being found were slim to none," he said. Back at the office, they combed through the old stack of notes and found one with a name and phone number from 2010; it was Corpew’s.

"When I saw Joe’s Trees come up on the phone, I had no idea what it was about. Then Darren asked me to describe the ring. When I did, he said, 'Yep, we found it.' It was amazing," Corpew said. He'd originally bought the ring in 2008, and though he replaced it in 2011 and got divorced in 2013, the call still caught him off guard. "I’m just thankful for them that they kept that note for 15 years and thought to call me," he said. He now plans to turn the band into another piece of jewelry.