Civil War cannon gets new home
More than 100 years’ worth of built-up rock removed from gun by A&M conservators
A 12-foot-long, 10,000-pound Civil War cannon excavated from the bottom of the Houston Ship Channel was dropped into place at its new Texas City home Wednesday.
The legendary Dahlgren gun was sunk more than 150 years ago aboard the USS Westfield and formed part of a trove of artifacts brought to the surface with the ship in 2009.
The cannon was brought to a specially designed exhibit at the Texas City Museum on Tuesday after spending the last five years at Texas A&M University, where conservators removed more than 100 years’ worth of rock that had built up around the weapon’s surface.
The transportation and final housing in the museum Wednesday was an almost equal challenge. The process required a crane to lift the cannon off the trailer and place it on a sidewalk protected with steel plates to avoid crushing the concrete, said
conservator Justin Parkoff, project manager at the Texas A&M Conservation Research Lab.
The cannon is as heavy as the average Asian elephant.
Parkoff described the cannon as “a beast” when news of its new museum home came out just after Christmas. He oversaw its 140-mile journey from A&M’s Riverside campus to Texas City. The Dahlgren’s new home is just 6.5 miles fromits original resting place.
“We’re thrilled,” said Billie Powers, assistant to the curator at the museum, “absolutely thrilled.”
Murky waters
The Dahlgren went down in the murky waters of Galveston Bay with the Westfield on New Year’s Day 1863during the Second Battle of Galveston. Confederate troops managed to recapture the island in an early morning surprise attack.
The Westfield, a converted Staten Island Ferry boat, had run aground. Its captain didn’t want the ship to be captured, so he called for evacuation and set a charge for the ship to be blown apart, thus avoiding enemy capture.
The charges went off prematurely, and he and 12 others went down with the ship.
The ship’s recovery in 2009 followed the largest maritime archeological rescue project ever undertaken in Texas.
Countless artifacts were discovered. As well as the cannon, personal items from the crew, like belt buckles and salt shakers, were found. There were fragments of glassware and ceramic plates plus hundreds of pieces of the ship’s boiler, which was blown to smithereens.
“It’s been a very difficult process,” Parkoff said in December. “We didn’t knowwhat any of this was — it’s unrecognizable. How do you make sense of hundreds of bits of metal?”
After years working with pneumatic tools and chisels, followed by multiple soakings in chemical baths to remove rock built up around them, teams are piecing the shards of metal together.
Destroyed boiler
A reconstruction of the destroyed boiler will follow the cannon display at the museum later this year. It will reach the ceiling, according to Parkoff.
Experts believe the new exhibits will tell one of the most important tales of the Civil War in Texas.
“Individually, these pieces mean nothing, but together they tell a story,” Park off said in December.
Once complete, the Westfield exhibit will be the second-largest of its kind in Texas. The largest is the French ship La Belle, which was recovered from Matagorda Bay. It is being conserved at Texas A&M and will end up in Austin.