A Deceptive Cannon

Well here's something you don't find in every cemetery.  A large cannon.  Oh, you see them sometimes in veteran's sections or perhaps guarding a gate.  But this was just off in a corner aiming nowhere in particular. 

I told my brother that it looked like Civil War vintage, possibly of a type called a Dahlgren gun.  

But now we have to explain this.  A 1903 date and a mark from a local foundry on the gun carriage.  Hmmmm.

I'm pretty sure there were no munitions factories of any import in Northwood Iowa at any point in history.  So lets get to work.

I was mostly right about the gun proper.  Not a Dahlgren but a similar type called a Rodman gun.  Cannon were named for their inventors, and each little incremental improvement in an old technology got its own moniker.  This type was first made in 1861 although this particular example was cast in 1865 in Reading PA.  It weighs almost 8,500 pounds and fired an eight inch projectile.

There are actually two of these guns in town, the other sits outside the courthouse.  At one point at least one of them was in the city park.  One assumes they came to town in the usual fashion, as war surplus and patriotic icons in the years after Appomattox. 

A gun of this caliber, and weighing over four tons, would require a very substantial carriage.  Frankly this does not look up to the task.  Some of these were surplused without carriages, or perhaps the original had deteriorated.   I imagine this 1903 ersatz was cobbled up as a "good enough" replacement when the gun was moved to the cemetery.  I do not suggest they attempt to fire it on this dubious base.