Civil War-era artifact in U.S. home turns out to be live ammunition: police – National
A Texas man who believed he owned a replica of a piece of Civil War artillery discovered it was actually live ammunition, local police said Tuesday.
Officers at the Atascosa County Sheriff’s Office were dispatched to a home in south Texas just before 8 a.m. Monday after a caller advised that he had a piece of Civil War-era ordnance that could possibly be a live explosive.
“The caller told deputies that he had owned the ordnance for years and had always thought it was a dummy round,” authorities said in a Facebook statement Tuesday, but he was alerted to its legitimacy when a military friend saw the object and suspected it was live.
The sheriff’s office said deputies contacted a specialist explosive disposal unit stationed at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, who arrived on location a short time later, where they confirmed the caller’s suspicion that the roughly 160-year-old ammunition was live.
Get daily National news
Get daily Canada news delivered to your inbox so you’ll never miss the day’s top stories.
The explosives team identified the device as a live Parrott round from the Civil War era and successfully transported it to an explosive range at Camp Bullis, where it was disposed of safely, the statement said.
No one was harmed during this incident and no charges are pending.
A Parrott round is a projectile fired from a Parrott rifle, a commonly used cannon invented during the American Civil War. According to the National Park Service, it was an effective tool in destroying brick-and-mortar fortifications and was employed with “devastating effect” by Union forces against Confederate-held territories.
Developed in 1860 by Robert Parrott, an inventor and businessman who was superintendent of the West Point Foundry, the Parrott rifle spun when it was fired, elongating and stabilizing its trajectory, making it a much more accurate weapon than prior designs.
A 200-pound Parrott rifle gun in use about to fire by Union artillery in the American Civil War.
Photo by Sipley/ClassicStock/Getty Images)
The discovery of live wartime ammunition in the U.S. happens occasionally. In 2021, bomb squad technicians safely detonated a Civil War-era cannonball found in Frederick County, Md.
In a similar set of circumstances to the Texas incident, a homeowner contacted the Office of the State Fire Marshal after being told by a family member that the cannonball was possibly live, authorities said at the time.
The homeowner was given the cannonball by another family member who had discovered it near a known battlefield.
Unexploded wartime weaponry has also been discovered in Canada.
In 2019, a Second World War-era device was found in Jasper National Park.
The discovery was made on July 4, 2019, when a group of climbers found an unexploded ordnance (UXO) on the north side of Mount Athabasca.
The government of Canada defines a UXO as military explosives that did not explode or function as intended.
The Department of National Defence said the UXO was a Second World War-era armour-piercing round, but didn’t know how it was shot or detonated. Their best guess as to why it was up on the mountain is that the round was used at some point as an option for avalanche control and didn’t end up exploding.
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
