One Man Dead Following Civil War Explosion

Posted by Eric Hazard | 3 Comments

One might expect to read a story here about a recent bombing in Iraq, or perhaps about violence in Somalia.

Rather, the death toll from the U.S. Civil War, circa 1861 – 1865, increased by one recently when a Virginia civil war ordinance collector met an untimely demise cleaning a cannon ball in his driveway. From the AP’s retelling of the February explosion:

More than 140 years after Lee surrendered to Grant, the cannonball was still powerful enough to send a chunk of shrapnel through the front porch of a house a quarter-mile from White’s home in this leafy Richmond suburb.

The man in question was a bit of a Civil War nut, spending his weekends with pail and shovel in hand, digging up old Civil War battle sites in hopes of finding relics. Common finds include old bullets and the occasional cannon ball. Normally, cannon balls pose little if any danger. They are either large balls of lead, or defused by time and decay.

However, our unfortunate restorer was working on restoring a Naval cannonball, which authorities believe may have been more tightly sealed, to protect against water, and thus more potent than their terrestrial brethren.

The weapon also had to be waterproof because it was designed to skip over the water at 600 mph to strike at the waterline of an enemy ship. The protection against moisture meant the ball could have remained potent longer than an infantry shell.

Still, our relic hunter was a rather advanced amateur. It is estimated he had previously worked on up to 1,600 shells for collectors and museums. On the day of the explosion, “he had 18 cannonballs lined up in his driveway to restore.” The problem was the deadly combination of the man’s drill, he was either drilling directly into the 9-inch, 75 pound cannonball, or he was using his drill with a grinder attachment, resulting in a shower of sparks. So even though our amateur cannonball restorer may have assumed the artifact was inert, the results would say otherwise.

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