CANCELED: The Mystery of the Buried Cannon
(Room Lanier Grand Ballroom H)
26 Aug 21
6:00 PM
-
7:15 PM
Tracks:
Speaker (Non-Member)
In 1976, workers installing an underground gasoline storage tank at a gasoline station being built on Galveston’s Broadway Avenue found something unexpected while digging: a muzzle-loading, smoothbore 19th-century cannon, buried three feet down. Where did it come from? Why was it there? Who owned it? No one knew. At first it was assumed it was from the Civil War, and for more than a decade it was displayed as a Civil War artifact at the Galveston Historical Society Museum. But the truth about the cannon was finally unveiled in the late 1980s, when an amateur historian discovered it was actually an artifact of the Texas Navy — a gun from the Texas Navy warship Brutus. As such, it was a remarkable rarity — the largest remaining piece of Texas’ Republic-era navy. How did it end up three feet deep under Broadway Avenue? That story is even more remarkable — one involving Galveston’s Brown family, Galveston Harbor, and the 1900 Hurricane, a story that will be revealed by Mark in this talk.