BAY MINETTE — The quest for better grades by a college student nearly a half-century ago led to the recovery of the 13-inch Sea Coast Mortar that is now on display at Bicentennial Park.

Tom McMillan was a student at Auburn when a history professor’s passion about the Civil War got the best of him.

“He got me interested in history,” McMillan said of the professor. “He would send me to the library to research the history of Blakeley. He and another professor had metal detectors and they would go to all the Civil War sites around Auburn to see what they could find.”

When the professor learned McMillan was from Stockton, the professor talked to the student into a field trip and tours of the sites in and around Mobile and Baldwin counties. The metal detecting failed to locate much, even during trips up and down the rivers.

“Growing up around here, I had always heard tales about guns in the river,” said McMillan. “So I started asking around and found two men, Lesley Busby and Clovis Williams, who said they knew where the mortar was.

“About two weeks later, Clovis got word to me that he had found it in the cutoff and had a pole sticking up beside it.”

Finding the mortar was the easy part. Getting it out of the mud and water was the hard part.

The mortar was hauled from Pensacola and arrived in Blakeley two days after the Civil War ended. It was left on a heavy cypress raft at Battery Huger near Spanish Fort. The storm surge from the 1906 Hurricane broke the raft free and sent it up river. A second hurricane in the 1930s may have pushed it even further up cutoff.

“There was a story in the Baldwin Times in 1939 that showed it partially out of the water,” said Leslie Smith.

By the time McMillan found it, the mortar was stuck in mud, about five feet below the water’s surface.

Community effort

“It really was a community effort,” said McMillan. “My father was in the logging business and knew a lot of people. Everyone pooled their equipment together. Getting it out of the mud was the result of hard work and ingenuity on the part of a lot of people.”

McMillan and others spent two days trying to figure out how to wrap cables around it, hoping to use trunnions (the parts that stick out the side of the barrel) as a way to lift it out.

“My father got mad at us, took off everything but his shorts and cap,” said McMillan. “The water was chin deep and he was standing on top of it. He found the (lifting eye) and had his big toe in the hold.

“He told me to follow his right leg down and put a shackle in the hole.”

Finding a way to hook to the mortar barrel was the first step. Lifting the 17,200 pounds of cast iron out was the next step. They loaded a Caterpillar tractor with a winch onto a 20x40-foot barge. A logging carriage was used to get the cable over the side and heading down to the mortar.

“Trying to pull it out, we broke a three-quarter-inch steel cable,” said McMillan. “We got a 1.25-inch cable and started pulling. The tide came in about the same time and helped break the suction and we were able to pull it up.”

There was no way to get the mortar up and over into the barge, so they had to move the barge with the mortar suspended just under water. The heavy weight on one end, caused the barge to tip.

“The back of the barge was up out of the water, while the front was almost underwater,” Smith said with a laugh. “And the way it swayed back and forth, it looked like a wayward bull on a rope.”

The initial salvage took an entire weekend. Since folks had to go back to work or school, the mortar didn’t get on dry land until the next weekend. They lowered the mortar at Gibson’s Landing, unloaded the Caterpillar and used it to winch the barrel onto the shore. Ironically, the site where it came aground is only 1,000 feet from its final resting place.

Ernest Duck and the work crew of the board of education built the carriage the mortar was placed on, said Smith.  “They did it all after hours. No school money was used in building that carriage.”