I was reading an article about the nonprofit Friends of the Vicksburg National Military Park & Campaign’s efforts to keep that city’s military park open during the current government shutdown.
I can remember a similar situation back in the 1990s when the park was forced to close, which resulted in a few rogue Civil War artifact hunters breaking into the park at night and digging up the ground, looking for spent ammunition and other souvenirs.
At the time, my dad and I were avid Civil War artifact hunters.
We traveled all over Yazoo County during our spare time, garage sale metal detector in hand, hoping to find the motherload of Minié balls or even a cannonball.
I was in about the sixth grade then, and I read everything I could about the Civil War, even offering unsolicited term papers on the war to my teachers.
Our metal detector was not the strongest in the world, so we did not enjoy the success some other local hunters did, but we did value the time spent outdoors, and we met a lot of landowners, most of whom were gracious enough to allow us to continue our trespasses when they learned what we were doing.
One afternoon, we were driving around the Bentonia community when we happened upon some friends of ours who lived out that way.
“What are y’all doing way out here?” one of them asked.
“We’re looking for Civil War artifacts,” my dad replied.
One of our friend’s kids looked at us and said, “Oh you mean the bomb!”
We asked him what he meant, and he began to describe what sounded an awful lot like a Civil War cannonball stuck in a tree.
Sure enough, his dad came along and told us that when he was a kid, he and his brothers had found it in a trench on their property nearby. They were frightened by it, since it seemed to be still live, and they put it in the base of a small tree.
Over the years, the tree had grown up around it, and the cannonball became wedged between multiple branches of wood.
Pretty soon, he led us to the tree, which was right behind a trailer house.
And there it was. The thing my dad and I had walked miles to find.
“Can I have it?” my dad asked.
“If you can get it out of there, it’s yours,” our friend said.
Keep in mind, this cannonball was very much full of powder and still very much live after 130-some-odd years.
My dad grabbed a nearby shovel, and he began to thrust this metal object into the part of the tree that bound this explosive device.
I’m standing there, excited about the prospect of finding a cannonball, and also afraid as I watched sparks fly from the tree with every hit to try and loosen the “bomb.”
After over a half an hour of pounding away at the tree, the cannonball popped loose, and out rolled a 12-pound howitzer round, fully-loaded.
My dad picked it up, and we carried it all the way back to the house.
For several months, my dad kept the cannonball in his shop, next to our house, fearing an explosion.
As he became more comfortable, he migrated the thing into the house, and he placed it in his display cabinet in our living room.
And that’s where it stayed for decades, serving as a conversation piece for visitors.
As the years passed, we became sort of numb to the explosive ornament. It was just there. Until it wasn’t.
About a decade ago, we noticed that the cannonball was gone from my parents’ living room.
When we inquired to my parents about its absence, we were told that it was too dangerous a device to be stored in the presence of their young grandchildren.
Gee, thanks.
I’m not sure if Civil War artifact hunting is as big of a hobby today as it was three decades ago, but the federal government would probably be well-served to keep the lights on in Vicksburg.
You never know who might be driving around with a metal detector and a shovel.
