The old grounds of the American Civil War are still hiding the odd musket ball, shirt button or even cannonball, and now and then someone finds one. If you find something like that on any of the battlefields that are now national historical sites, of course, you can't keep them; they are historical artifacts that belong to the public, not to an individual. Rather more so for artifacts that are in a museum or official National Parks Service or state park display; take something from those, and you are stealing.
Seems a kid visiting Mobile (Alabama) Bay's Fort Morgan didn't get the message. He managed to lift five Civil War cannonballs from the fort, and hid them in his grandmother's luggage - where they were discovered by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents at the Gulf Shores International Airport.
A TSA agent discovered a set of stolen Civil War-era cannonballs in a passenger’s suitcase during a routine security screening at an Alabama airport earlier this month, law enforcement officials said.
The Transportation Security Administration said in a statement Friday that the relics were discovered at Gulf Shores International Airport on July 18 after the agent observed what appeared to be a large, opaque item inside a suitcase during an X-ray screening. When he opened the luggage, he found five small cannonballs wrapped in paper towels and notified a supervisor.
It wouldn't be prudent for anyone to think these were just inert spheres of iron. In the Civil War, both sides did use exploding artillery shells, and if one of those was to be smuggled someplace, well, the odds may be high that they would be, after all these years, inert. But it's not impossible that they may still be ert.
“I had never seen anything quite this unique,” TSA Officer Justin Dupree said in a statement from the agency. “I’ve seen inert grenades and training munitions but never an Indiana Jones-esque stolen artifact-type situation.”
The cannonballs — the largest about the size of grapefruits and weighing about as much as a shot put ball — were inactive and didn’t contain any explosive material or active components, the TSA said. Still, cannonballs are artillery munitions and considered prohibited items on planes.
Artillery munitions? Prohibited items on planes? You don't say.
Here's the onion:
Police eventually determined the cannonballs were stolen from Fort Morgan, based on paint marking applied to the artifacts by fort staff, and that they dated to the American Civil War. The historic Gulf Shores fort played a significant role in several military conflicts, including the Civil War.
The Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office said Thursday that a juvenile stole the cannonballs from a storage area in the fort and then placed them in their grandmother’s checked bag. The grandmother told officers she did not know they were stolen.
Now, if I had tried a boneheaded stunt like that when I was a young fella, my grandma would have cut a switch then and there, even if she had to take one from a potted plant in the airport, and whupped the daylights out of me. And I'd have had it coming, too; we can hope that this grandma gave this kid, at least, what my grandma would have described as a "durn good piece of her mind."
In this case, all's well that ends well, and those cannonballs are sure to be back where they belong by now. Still, though; what was this young skull full of mush thinking? And why stick Grandma with the contraband? It's a bit of a puzzler.
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