San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Cannonball found at La Villita remains mystery
Did Mayor Maverick ever say anything about a cannonball found in La Villita? My grandfather found a 12-pound cannonball while digging a flower bed in 1939 at La Villita for the National Youth Administration. The workers had two months to grade the land before the actual restoration started in October 1939. We have an undated clipping about the find; any word where I can find more information on this or the cannonball itself?
— Julian Felan Jr.
There’s no direct reference to archaeological finds at La Villita, now a city-owned arts and crafts community, in the 22-page book titled “Old Villita” (covered here Feb. 24). It was one of the American Guide Series written by the Writers’ Project of the federal Works Progress Administration, with Maury Maverick, then mayor of San Antonio, as “cooperating sponsor.”
The book is about the clearing of the one-block area south of downtown and restoring it to something like its appearance as a Spanish colonial settlement of the early 18th century.
Work crews were provided by the National Youth Administration (1935-1939), a New Deal-era program that gave employment to people ages 16-25 on federally funded projects. There were 72 NYA workers on the restoration project at La Villita, and another 50 made arts and crafts, such as tiles or pottery, for use at the site as of a report from the agency quoted in the San Antonio Express, Nov. 5, 1939.
The researcher director for the restoration was Martin L. Crimmins (covered here Nov. 7, 2010), a retired Army officer and avocational herpetologist who was a curator at the Witte Museum, where the NYA worked on the snake exhibit. Crimmins was the son of a wealthy New York contractor who had been a friend of President Theodore Roosevelt, cousin of Franklin D. Roosevelt, president at the time of the Villita project.
A November 1939 NYA progress report omits a find by NYA worker Gilbert Delgado of an old water well in what was becoming Juárez Plaza (named for former Mexican President Benito Juárez). “Workers removing dirt from the plaza to bring it closer to street level on Villita Street had almost reached the halfway mark (when) Delgado sank his pick into solid rock,” said the San Antonio Light, Oct. 13, 1939.
Four large rocks were removed — including one marked “1897,” presumably the date when the well was capped. Project supervisor E.M. Todd then “directed measurement of the well.” It was 28 feet deep, with more than 10 feet of water at the bottom.
About a month later, after the well was cleaned out, workers found “a boxful of artifacts an antiquarian could browse over for hours,” according to the Express, Nov. 17, 1939. They included “a gold wedding ring, spoons, arrowheads, a lock, nails, forks, spoons, a bottle, buttons, short ribs of beef and chicken bones” under 2 or 3 feet of mud. Another stone was found inscribed with the date 1788.
The clipping you saw does not come from either of these major daily newspapers, which don’t seem to have covered Jacinto Felan’s find. NYA records — known as Record Group 119 — are kept by the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Md. Tom McAnear, an archivist there, said that after a search of the records, “We do not find mention of the cannonball found at La Villita. Although the cannonball was found by someone working for a federal agency, it is likely the cannonball was turned over to a local representative for the city of San Antonio.”
So: The city archives and Office of Historic Preservation didn’t have anything on it, and neither did the county, which administered NYA and other federal work projects. The Alamo didn’t have it, and the Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio was three decades away from being founded.
At the Witte Museum, curator Amy Fulkerson found a record of a 12-and-a-half-pound cannonball donated by Evan M. Todd, who was supervisor of both the La Villita and Witte NYA projects. This one has a slightly different origin story, having been found by workers in 1939 when the night watchman’s cabin was relocated on the Witte campus.
“No other cannonballs were donated for a few years after,” Fulkerson said.
So could your grandfather have worked on this project as well? It appears that NYA employees were moved around as needed. Another question: Was it a cannonball or something else?
“They are hard to identify because some things that look like cannonballs aren’t cannonballs,” said Bruce Winders, former curator and historian at the Alamo, going on to cite an example: “Heavy metal spheres found around old plantation houses are thought to be evidence of a Civil War battle. Instead, they are evidence of a sugar house where these ‘cannonballs’ were used to crush sugar cane.”
In the San Antonio area, similar objects were used in quarries to crush stone.
“Unlike later Civil War-era projectiles that can be identified by their distinct shapes, round shots and other spherical metal can easily be mistaken for one another,” Winders said.
The key can be size and composition: Does the object conform to the specific sizes and weights to fit the guns from which they were to be fired? If it’s made of iron, it could be a Texas or American cannonball; steel is more likely to be an industrial crusher. If it’s iron or even stone, it could be a Spanish cannonball; bronze might be Spanish or Mexican of the Texas Revolutionary period.
La Villita “was within range of Mexican and Texian guns during both the Battle of Bexar and the Battle of the Alamo. To ascertain whether the Witte’s cannonball came from the Texas Revolutionary period, it would need to be analyzed for measurement and composition. What’s odd is that it was identified as having come from the Witte grounds — far from the 1835-1836 battles.
If there were two cannonballs discovered under Todd’s supervision, he didn’t give both to the Witte.