This Artifact Ain't So Real

From the July 2017 America's Civil War. "X-Ray Vision."

A picture of a tree with a shell embedded in it.

Lt. Colonel Archibald Blakely's 78th Pennsylvania Infantry fought in the woods near the Brotherton Farm at the 1863 Battle of Chickamauga, and during a postwar trip to the battlefield he obtained this shell-struck tree trunk as a reminder of the the fight.

Sorry, Colonel, you fell for a fake.  A team at Pittsburgh's Senator John Heinz History Center, where the object was exhibited, X-rayed the stump and discovered that someone had cut a shell in half, placed it in a man-made cavity, and let the tree heal around the opening so it looked natural.

Some shrewd local had anticipated a market of Civil War veterans avid for souvenirs of a time when "their hearts were touched by fire."

There's One Born Every second.  --Old Secesh