Union troops dumped more than 1 million ball cartridges and 26,000 pounds of gunpowder into the Congaree River during the capture of Columbia in February 1865.
Sean Norris/TRCA Civil War cannonball recovered from South Carolina’s Congaree River.
More than 150 years ago, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman triumphantly smashed through the South as the Civil War neared its end. Now, a clean-up project in South Carolina has dredged up a number of Confederate weapons that Sherman’s troops dumped in the Congaree River to demoralize their vanquished foes.
The items include cannonballs, bullets, rusty swords, and even a piece of unexploded ordnance that had to be “demilitarized” at nearby Shaw Air Force Base.
“It’s an interesting story to tell,” Sean Norris, the archaeological program manager at environmental consulting firm TRC remarked to CBS News. “It’s a good one — that we were able to take a real piece of it rather than just the written record showing this is what happened.”
As Norris explained to Live Science, the presence of these items wasn’t a complete surprise. Norris noted that underwater investigations had “indicated the presence of multiple types of cannonballs and projectiles as well as hundreds, if not thousands of musket rounds.” However, it’s only now that these items have been recovered from the water as the project to clean up toxic waste in the Congaree River comes to a close.
Sean Norris/TRCGeneral Sherman’s Union troops dumped more than 1 million ball cartridges and 26,000 pounds of gunpowder into the Congaree River in February 1865.
That project, which lasted from early 2022 until October 2023, was focused on cleaning up coal tar which had been dumped in the river in the first half of the 20th century by a local gas company. But the project also turned up a number of historic artifacts.
“We removed an additional two and half tons of other debris out of the river. You get focused on coal tar and yes we took…
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