SPANISH FORT — A local historian who helped uncover and preserve a centuries-old cannon found in Spanish Fort said city plans to display the artifact could lead to the piece being damaged or vandalized.

The iron cannon was found in an undisclosed location in Spanish Fort in 2017. City officials plan to put the gun on display on a concrete base outside City Hall.

At a city council meeting Monday, June 20, Shawn Holland said the cannon is a rare and unusual artifact and should not be left on display exposed to the elements and potential vandalism.

"Let me kind of put it this way; you find a very rare classic automobile, just incredible, and you spend a few thousand dollars or a lot of thousand dollars to make it look beautiful again," Holland said. "Do you bring it home and put it out in the front yard on top of concrete blocks? Or do you put it in a respectful place, out of the weather, away from vandals?"

She said vandals will be tempted to paint the cannon in the same manner that a Civil War gun in Mobile is often painted by high school students.

Mayor Mike McMillan said the city will have a surveillance system set up to watch the cannon with cameras linked to the police station.

"The way this cannon is being set up, I'm not worried about anybody stealing this cannon," McMillan said. "In addition to that, we have full positional surveillance equipment to make sure we don't have issues."
Holland said the plan to mount the cannon in concrete will also damage the iron piece.

"Our humidity will start to deteriorate the cannon again no matter how many coats of whatever protective is on the outside," Holland said. "Also, the chemicals in the mortar and the blocks themselves will work slowly, but surely to deteriorate what's left of our wonderful cannon."

She said the cannon should be mounted on a replica of the type of carriage that it would have been placed on originally and placed in the entrance hall at city hall.

McMillan said the gun is too heavy to place on the floor. "It would break every tile we've got," he said.
The cannon barrel is 8.75 feet long and weighs about 1,200 pounds, according to reports.

The mayor said city officials would consider Holland's comments in making plans for the display of the gun.
"Thank you for what you said," he told Holland. "I'll ask the council. We'll take your thoughts under consideration and see where we go from there."

McMillan also thanked Holland for her help in recovering and sending the cannon to a restoration laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida in 2017.

"Shawn was very helpful in the early stages of that cannon. She was right there on that site. She actually designed the cradle that we shipped this to Tallahassee and had it built," the mayor said. "It was the strangest thing. We had to wrap this whole thing in Ace bandages. I went to Med Cap and she had to order all these Ace bandages because it had to be the adhesive type and then we had to buy noodles to pack it in. It was an undertaking."

While battles were fought in Spanish Fort during the Civil War and American Revolution, Holland said she felt that the cannon is from an earlier period.

"When I saw this cannon, I knew immediately that it wasn't even from the Revolutionary War era," she said. "It came from long before that."

Holland said the closest match she could find to the Spanish Fort cannon were guns in a battery in Youghal, which she said is pronounced "y'all," Ireland. Those cannons were placed there in 1640 and were said to have been used in Waterford, Ireland, in the 1500s.

She said the Spanish Fort cannon may be an indication that the Spanish had a fort or mission site in the area as early as the 1500s. She said the location at the mouth of the five rivers going into the Alabama interior and the head of Mobile Bay would make the area an ideal location for colonization.

"I've been looking for a mission because there's Spanish missions all up and down every river and coastline of Florida, but you get to Mobile Bay and it's the best bay on the entire Gulf Coast," Holland said. "It has five river systems emptying into it that infiltrate the entire Southeast and of course, they were looking for riches and they needed to get into the interior, so the rivers were much better than the rivers going north out of Pensacola."

In an earlier interview, Jessica Burns with the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Resources, said the surface of the cast iron cannon was too corroded to find any markings that might indicate where it was manufactured or when it was made.