Confederate Land Mine Found...Then Destroyed-- Part 2: Found At a Construction Site

Civil War land mines were mostly converted cannonballs and more commonly used in Virginia and Georgia.

Matt Bell found it while doing excavating with a small track backhoe uncovered it at a construction site near Danville, Arkansas, in Yell County on Wednesday.  They at first thought it to be a solid cannonball and quite a nice souvenir.

Another man tossed it out of the ditch and Bell picked it up and put it in the bed of his pickup and drove it home the 65 miles to Hot Springs.  He measured and weighed it and found it to be 31.6 pounds and 6.25-inches in diameter.  he found out it was definitely a land mine at the Civil War Museum West in Hot Springs.

There were at least eleven skirmishes in Yell County during the war.  One was at Danville on March 18, 1864.

Civil war shells are often defused and I sure wish they had defused it rather than blown it up.  That was quite an artifact.

--Old Secesh