Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 5, 1995 TAG: 9504050051
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
At first glance, it looked like a piece of dark metal. She knelt and pulled the dirt back with her mattock.
A Civil War-era cannonball emerged. "Good thing I didn't hit," she said, laughing.
Actually, the cannonball wasn't dangerous, Hodges found out later. It's just a heavy, iron ball about the size of a grapefruit.
The cannon ball does pack a load of intrigue, however. To begin with, the odds of Hodges finding a 130-year-old Civil War relic near her house off Bradshaw Road were pretty long.
But she did. The question that lingers is - how did it get there?
Most likely, the cannonball was discarded in June 1864 as a Union army retreated over Catawba Mountain.
The Yankees were in a hurry after being ambushed by the Confederates at Hanging Rock. It was a "long and fatiguing march," one soldier was quoted as saying in war records, conducted on a hot, dusty, summer's day over a steep mountain.
With Confederate cavalrymen nipping at their heels, the cannonball may have become expendable after an officer recommended discarding all non-essential equipment.
"The road up the mountain is rough and will be very difficult for artillery...I have noticed...many worthless wagons, which might be thrown out and the horses used to assist the artillery," read one dispatch sent to the Union commanding officer, Gen. David Hunter, before the Yankees began to ascend Catawba Mountain.
The cannonball doesn't appear to have been fired, so chances are it was merely dumped.
The place where Hodges found the ball - in the narrow Bradshaw Creek valley between Catawba and Fort Lewis mountains - is a few miles away from the crooked old road used by the Union forces to retreat westward. (The Civil War-era road ran west of Virginia 311, the present-day highway over Catawba Mountain.)
However, records show that the nervous Union officers, already having been surprised at Hanging Rock, made sure all avenues leading to their escape route were guarded. So it's not far-fetched to imagine Union scouts patrolling as far west as the Montgomery-Roanoke County line, where Hodges found the cannonball.
That's the most plausible scenario but not the only one. "Could have been a lot of explanations," Howard McManus says. "Troops went back and forth through there several times during the war."
Hodges took her archaeological discovery to McManus' shop in Roanoke. An author and Civil War dealer in curios such as documents and photographs, he confirmed her suspicions about the cannonball's identity.
It's a 12-pound ball know as a "solid shot." This kind of ball was not filled with powder or designed to explode like other artillery missiles common to the war. Nonetheless, a "solid shot" would get your attention if it struck you, McManus explained.
The going market rate among collectors for these cannonballs isn't particularly high because they're not very rare, at least in areas where Civil War battles occurred.
But Brenda Hodges never found one before. "It was fascinating. Why was it here? It got my curiosity up," she says.
She kept the cannonball in a box in her house for some time. She also carted it around in the back seat of her car.
In retrospect, she admits good-humoredly that it probably would have been wiser to have had it checked out immediately.
"You can't hide anything from kids. Whoom! Uh-oh, mom - there's a hole in the wall," she said.
Fortunately, Hodges' cannonball wasn't potentially explosive, unlike the one workers found beneath a Salem sidewalk two years ago. It, too, was of Civil War vintage, but it also had a fuse designed to make the shell explode.
The New River and Roanoke valleys were the scene of a few Civil War engagements, even though these events aren't well known or widely recognized today. Nonetheless, finding a Civil War cannonball around here ranks on the improbability scale with winning the lottery or being struck by lightning.
But if you do, it's recommended to call the police or the local sheriff's office, who have demolition experts.
Fortunately, all the cannonball has fired for Brenda Hodges has been her curiosity. She's lived near Bradshaw Creek all her life, yet never knew of the area's brush with Civil War notoriety. Now she wants to find out more.
"It's not really worth anything. It's just valuable in terms of history. I'm going to hold onto it. It's part of my past and your past."
by CNB