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I've been meaning to post these pictures that were taken a couple of weeks ago at the museum--we do have some neat stuff there! Here I am with a VERY scary looking weapon called a boarding pike that was used by the Confederate Navy during the Civil War to deter Union soldiers from boarding their gunboats. Can you imagine boarding a boat full of guys carrying these? But apparently someone did because this particular boarding pike was captured from a Confederate gunboat on the Cumberland River during the Battle of Fort Donelson, Tennessee in 1862.
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And here I am with our #2 most famous artifact at the museum (#2 behind Santa Anna's leg): our Abraham Lincoln target board! In 1863 Christopher Spencer brought a new gun he had invented to the White House for Abraham Lincoln to test fire. The cool thing about the gun was that it could shoot seven bullets before being reloaded instead of the one bullet that most of the Civil War guns could fire. So Lincoln and Spencer went out behind the White House, and Lincoln fired seven shots at this very piece of wood! Then he gave the piece of wood to Mr. Spencer, and somehow it ended up at the museum. (Lincoln liked the gun so much that he had the government buy a bunch for the troops--they were called the Spencer Repeating Rifle.)
And, yesterday I was going through some old card catalog files trying to find some information about a mysterious cannonball that my boss and I found in the artifact vault, and I discovered that the cannonball was from the "Mormon War" in Nauvoo! I was so excited. We don't know who fired it, or even what year it is from, but probably somewhere between 1844 and 1846. Good times at the museum!
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