Savannah, Georgia– A museum in Georgia’s oldest city on Wednesday received a truckload of treasures from the early period of U.S. history — 17 cannons that experts believe sank to the bottom of the Savannah River during the American Revolution and remained undiscovered for nearly 240 years.
Workers carefully lifted the large weapons one by one from the back of a truck and transported them to their new home at the Savannah History Museum, which will display them in time to celebrate America’s 250th birthday on the Fourth of July.
“They look brand new,” said Andrea Farmer, an archaeologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who was part of the team that researched and preserved the cannons. “They could pretty much be kicked out if someone wanted to.”
The artifacts were discovered in 2021 when a bulldozer dredging sediment from the river bed as part of an Army Corps project to deepen the Savannah Shipping Channel pulled a cannon in its metal jaws. The crew soon dug up two more.
Within just over a year, a total of 19 cannons had been raised from the site downstream from Savannah, the place where Georgia was founded in 1733 as the last of Britain’s 13 American colonies.
After being pulled from the river, most of the cannons left Georgia for several years to undergo cleaning and preservation work in a Texas laboratory.
Archaeologists initially assumed that the cannons likely dated back to the Civil War. But further research indicated that it was likely nearly a century old and sank during the American Revolution’s bloody siege of the savannah.
Savannah was under British occupation in the fall of 1779, when colonists planned an attack to retake the city with the help of French allies.
When French ships carrying troops were spotted off the coast of Georgia, British forces dropped at least six ships into the Savannah River downstream from the city to block the French ships.
The ensuing ground battle was one of the bloodiest of the war. British forces killed nearly 300 colonial fighters and their allies, and wounded hundreds more.
The Savannah History Museum is located right next to the battlefield. On Wednesday, its employees hoisted the cannons, each weighing up to 1,500 pounds (680 kilograms), onto custom display stands that employees likened to giant wine racks.
The cannons will be part of a new exhibit about Savannah’s role in the American Revolution, which is scheduled to open on the Fourth of July weekend, museum curator Samantha Moss said.
“Our great team has been preparing for months — building installations and planning how to safely display these very large, very special artifacts,” she said.
Both iron cannons emerged from the river covered in a thick crust of clay and metal.
Two were left in that raw condition and are on display in the museum. The other 17 were sent to Texas A&M University, which has a laboratory specialized in preserving underwater artifacts. Its employees spent years cleaning the large weapons and coating them in paint and wax to prevent rust and corrosion.
“A lot of them have scratch marks on the side from anchoring or dredging, so there are some scars on the cannons,” said Chris Dostal, a professor of marine archeology who leads the University of Texas.&Conservation Research Laboratory M. “But most of them look pretty extraordinary.”
Most cannons arrived with wooden plugs still closing their bores, which remained filled with cannonballs and powder charges.
Radiocarbon dating of the wooden plugs has placed them roughly in the late 1700s, Dostal said. His team shared the cannons’ measurements and other details with experts in London, who concluded that three of them were very likely to have been forged by the British Army.
The rest appears to be of French design but bears no obvious markings. Dostal said he suspects those weapons may have been dumped in America around the time of the war.
Other artifacts found with the cannons included pieces of anchors and part of the ship’s bronze bell. Like the cannons, none of them bore inscriptions indicating the ship they came from.
This means that many details about the cannons’ origins remain a mystery.
“You don’t have all the information,” Farmer said. “You try to put it together the best you can.”