Mystery no more: Unearthed ‘cannonball’ isn’t what it appeared to be, NC woman says
A decade ago, Gwenda Cruickshanks’ son went exploring after a hurricane and returned to their Oak Island home with an unusual, and at first, deeply concerning find.
The mysterious, muddy sphere he found buried in a marsh was a cannonball, they thought, long lost and forgotten by pirates or Civil War soldiers — and Cruickshanks was scared it would explode.
But there was excitement, too, for the now-retired nurse, who has loved archaeology all her life. Maybe it was left over from a battle? She would wonder.
Years went by. It never detonated, but the family kept it outside just in case.
Still, the mystery of where the cannonball came from, who it had belonged to, nagged at her. She wanted to know its story.
“I thought about it and thought about it a long time,” she told McClatchy News.
Looking for answers
Earlier this month, 10 years after the cannonball was found, she turned to the North Carolina Archaeological Society group on Facebook for help.
“I look for stuff for 50 years. Nothing. [Then my] son finds a cannonball accidentally,” she wrote. “Is this an important find? What would be the proper thing to do with it?”
The ball is hefty, she said. When shaken “you hear a little something in it,” she wrote. A white circle on the sphere appeared to be a “fuse pocket” to several people.
Some worried, like she did, that after all this time it was still “live,” and ready to explode.
While most cannonballs were simply heavy lead balls, later versions — like those used during the Civil War — were designed to explode.
Cruickshanks consulted and met up with a man she described as a “cannonball expert,” who also owns several cannonballs himself, to put the mystery to bed once and for all.
He had surprising news.
A ‘cool conversation piece’
“What I have is an interesting and cool conversation piece,” she wrote on Facebook. “A round, old looking ball of concrete.”
It’s not what she was hoping to hear.
“I thought for 10 years … it’s something exciting, from a battle or something, and then I find out I’m so wrong,” she told McClatchy News.
“It’s old, yeah, but it’s a big concrete ball from somewhere.”
She may be disappointed, but the mystery isn’t entirely solved. Cruickshanks now knows what it isn’t — a cannonball — but not what it actually is, she told McClatchy.
At least she’s fairly certain it isn’t going to turn her living room into a crater, which is good, because to her, it’s still a valuable archaeological find.
The concrete ball could make a fine coffee table decoration, or an interesting door stop. Cruickshanks said she’s figuring out just what to do with it.
“I’m going to keep it,” she said. “I love it now. Even if it’s not (a cannonball), I love it.”
