Casual yard work took a dangerous twist for Stephanie Joy Mitchell when she found what may have been a Civil War-era weapon in her Vancouver backyard.
Mitchell, 48, was digging up stones to move them to a project in her front yard. She picked up a stone that was particularly smooth, round and heavy — then she realized it wasn’t a stone at all.
She turned it over in her hands and noticed a cork plugging up the side. She called her mother over and together they realized: “This looks like a cannonball,” said Mitchell, a graphic designer and artist.
Mitchell carefully set it down, snapped a photo on her phone and texted her neighbor to warn her of what she had found. She then called the Vancouver police, and it wasn’t long before officers came knocking.
“The police take one look at the thing and they’re like, ‘Let’s call the bomb squad,’” Mitchell said.
After that, what started as yard work became an eight hour ordeal, with a brief intermission when Mitchell rushed over to the Vancouver Arts and Music Festival reception to accept its People’s Choice Award for a charcoal portrait she drew. She then rushed back to her house, where there was now a bomb squad officer and six technicians from the U.S. Air Force Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit, according to The Columbian, which first reported the finding.
According to that article, the technicians were unable to identify the cannonball in the unit’s database of “all military ordnance that’s ever been produced,” but they speculated that it could be from Civil War times or before.
Reached for comment, the Vancouver Police Department said the Portland Police Bureau’s Metro Explosive Disposal Unit responded and took possession of the cannonball. The Police Bureau did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Mitchell said she didn’t know much about military ammunition before stumbling across the object in her yard, but she knew enough to keep a distance, recalling cartoons where characters light a cannonball’s fuse before firing it off.
The cannonball likely had gunpowder inside it, military historian Jeff Davis told KPTV.
It may have been from the Civil War, Davis said, and could have still been dangerous.
“If it had gone off, then the cannonball would have exploded,” Davis told KPTV. “People would have been just as dead as they would have been in the Civil War.”
Mitchell said the officers took X-rays of the cannonball in her backyard, then brought it to a site in Portland to examine and detonate it.
Afterward, Mitchell reflected on the whirlwind day, feeling lucky that her 17-year-old son was not at home and that her two 100-pound Rottweilers hadn’t trampled over the cannonball when it sat amid the rocks under her backyard shrub.
Her home studio and office — where she spends much of her time — is only about 15 feet from where she found the cannonball, she said.
“It’s just crazy that that was just sitting there,” she said.
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