Posted on 02/09/2023 11:42:19 AM PST by Red Badger
Over 50,000 Americans died at Gettysburg, making it the bloodiest battle of the bloodiest war in our nation's history.
And if you'd stepped on this sucker, you might have been the last casualty of the Civil War.
From The Hill:
According to the park, the shell was found within the Little Round Top rehabilitation project area in the southwest corner of Little Round Top, the site of a Union victory over the Confederacy on July 2, 1863, amid the Battle of Gettysburg.
Officials with the park say the device dates to 1863. It weighs about 10 pounds, and measures about 7 inches long.
This is a national park, it's been around forever, and they still just now found this shell?
How did they miss it in the last 16 decades? I just find that hard to believe.
The shell was handled on Wednesday by the 55th Ordnance Disposal Company team from Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The team gently washed off the shell and removed it from Little Round Top to be destroyed off-site.
Local roads were closed on Wednesday afternoon after the device's discovery, though they have since reopened.
It's a pity they had to destroy this piece of history, but I guess that's better than leaving it in a museum where it could explode at any time.
I wonder if there are more artifacts like this one yet to be discovered.
If a place like Gettysburg – which you'd think would have been searched and excavated completely at this point – has this shell lying around, it might be worth your time to search any local battlefields near you.
Just be careful not to go out with a bang.
Appears that the idiot writer mistook casualties for dead. Unless he is 14 years old. That’s about when I first figured it out.
Verdun in France, even worse. Massive WWI battle there, “Operation Gericht”.
Farmers are still getting blown up when their tractors hit buried Unexploded ordnance from 1916.
Land being reclaimed for farming and boom…
This is just a dumb question. The ground at Gettysburg is full of iron -- minis, balls, shot, and lots of musket parts.
My father used to dig around there when he was a teenager. He said one of the most interesting things he found were muskets with the barrels stuffed with five or six charges and balls. Apparently, during the heat of the battle, soldiers would load and fire so quickly that with the din and smoke, they couldn't tell if the thing went off or not. They just kept loading it until they finally figured out that the barrel was full, then threw the gun down, probably to head to the rear.
Digging has been banned there for years. There's no way they could excavate the entire battlefield.
Danger UXB
I vaguely remember reading about some human remains being found during a road widening project there years ago.
7,058 combined KIA with another 10k missing.
My favorite EOD/UXB tale is about RAF Scampton’s (near Lincoln, UK) gate guard which turned out to be a fully armed Grand Slam 22,000 pound bomb.
Jury is still out as to whether it’s true:
Actually Biden might shed some light on this from his own experience while he was involved in the battle at Gettysburg.
Gettysburg was 3 days fighting and just 30 miles away is Antietam - I believe the author means 50,000 killed and wounded but I thought Gettysburg was more like 30,000 casualties- with 10-15K killed and missing. I was just at Gettysburg and Antietam a couple weeks ago, I remember reading Antietam had 25,000 casualties in a single day
I grew up in north Mississippi in the late 50’s to late 60’s, about 40 miles from Ole Miss at Oxford.
To people there, the Civil War never really ended.
I remember as a child that an old, old man, probably in his late 80’s at that time, pointed to a ridge across a newly built road widening project in front of his rural home, saying to me in hushed tones, “There’s a Yankee soldier buried over on that hill.”............
Its black powder. Its still volatile. People underestimate it.
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/news/civil-war-2.html?firefox=1
140 yrs old, exploded and killed that guy
bttt
He literally died doing what he loved.......................
You’re absolutely right that the area is positively filled with metal battle debris. Digging wasn’t always banned, and it’s not banned in adjacent areas annd tons of stuff has been excavated and placed on the market. Estimates are that there were 6-8 musket/rifle rounds discharged during the three day battle, plus artillery. I recently took my third trip there and bought a nice little collection of rounds + a fragment of an artillery shell. Going rate for a 54 caliber round is about $3.95
“Iron Harvest”
“He estimated it was from the 1870s.”
Someone brought me some gourds (yes gourds) of black powder they found in an old log house in Texas. This was really old so I decided to see if it was still good. Yes, yes it was. Worked real good.
Only if you get caught.
My property butts up against a National Park where there were several Civil War battles. A local university sits on lands occupied by both armies at one time and when they do new construction they will run into unexploded ordinance and locals will once in a blue moon find them on their property.
My Dad recalls a local pastor who kept an unexploded cannon ball in their house as a door stop back in the 1950’s. I think someone finally told them hey, that thing is dangerous and they got it disposed off. My late uncle and his buddy were swimming in a pond in the park in the 50’s and found a mortar shell in the bottom of it and brought it up. The police came and got it and detonated it.
It is a fact that were about 50,000 casualties at Gettysburg. But as you correctly noted, casualties doesnt mean deaths.
To illustrate that with an example, two of the casualties. were Union Colonel Chamberlain and Confederate General Kemper. Some years later Chamberlain became Governor of Maine, Kemper became Governor of Virginia.
“Over 50,000 Americans died at Gettysburg, making it the bloodiest battle of the bloodiest war in our nation’s history”.
WRONG! There were around 50,000 casualties......dead and wounded.
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