The Tale of a Gun—IX-inch Dahlgren #FP573
The Tale of a Gun—IX-inch Dahlgren #FP573
It's Not Just a Cannon, It's a Story
During the early summer 2009, East Carolina University and the South Carolina Institute for Archaeology and Anthropology recorded two cannon at Mars Bluff—the site of a Civil War Confederate navy yard. The gunboat CSS Pee Dee, built and armed at the Mars Bluff Navy Yard, was scuttled on either March 15 or 18, 1865. The gun, under study as a logistics and documentary exercise, is a IX-inch Dahlgren smoothbore cannon. It is marked with numbers indicating a mid-July 1862 manufacture date. This date suggests that this barrel was issued to a U.S. Navy ship after mid-1862 and is not one of 1,000 guns captured in Norfolk when Union forces evacuated that navy yard. Tracing this particular cannon's history sheds light on Civil War ordnance production and transportation networks. This study is designed to show how one artifact can be a metonym, containing far more information than its literal identity denotes.
Keywords: Mars Bluff, gunboat, CSS Pee Dee, Mars Bluff Navy Yard, Dahlgren smoothbore cannon, ordnance production, South Carolina
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