After suffering the indignities of
being buried in the mud for 50 years, then sunk in concrete for 40 more, Doc Thiessen's cannon
has finally seen the light of day.
November 11, 1998
With a tongue of flame, a cloud of smoke and a searing crack,
Monmouth College's Civil War cannon was finally fired on campus for the first time at the
kickoff of the 1996 Homecoming football against College.
The cannon was fired two more times during the game—once when
the Scots kicked a field goal and once when they recovered a Rams fumble. Then it was rolled
to its new permanent resting place in the lobby of Haldeman-Theissen Science Center.
The cannon already has a rich legacy, although much of it has
been spent buried underwater or in cement. The Class of 1903 got the cannon from the Rock
Island Arsenal and planned to give it to the college as a class gift. Several members of the
Class of 1904 had other ideas for it, though. They stole the 815-pound gun from a barn on
Railroad St., dragged it about five miles north of town and tossed the barrel into Cedar
Creek, having first set fire to the carriage.
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Professors Garrett
Thiessen (standing) and Albert Nicholas examine the 815-lb. barrel of the artillery rifle,
shortly after it was recovered from Cedar Creek in 1952. |
The fate of the cannon remained a mystery until 1950, when
Wallace Barnes, one of the lead conspirators from the class of '04, wrote an article in the
alumni bulletin describing in detail the theft and disposal of the cannon. He included
photographs taken in 1904 from the bridge over Cedar Creek with Xs indicating where the cannon
was buried. Several searches were made of the creek over the next two years, but to no avail.
Then, in October 1952, chemistry professor Garrett Thiessen
put together a search party with philosophy professor Harold Ralston, education professor
Albert Nicholas and several students. This time, they came equipped with modern technology: a
metal detector loaned to them by a local gas utility.
"We spent most of the day out there looking for that thing,
but even with the detector we couldn't find it," said Neil Verigan '54, one of the students in
the search party who is now retired and living near Portland, Ore. "We had just about given up
and were getting ready to go home when Nicholas thought that maybe the creek had shifted over
the years and its banks had changed. So he decided to make one more pass and go over a place
we hadn't searched before. It wasn't more than a couple of minutes before we heard a bunch of
beeps coming from the machine."
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Professor Bill Urban
(left) and Don Harker were the two individuals most responsible for the cannon's
restoration.
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As it turns out, the cannon wasn't even completely buried in
the creek bed. Verigan said the muzzle was less than three inches below the surface of the
water.
"We were pretty excited," Verigan said. "This was something
that had been gone for 50 years. It was like finding buried treasure."
The searchers triumphantly pulled the cannon from the mud and
trucked it back to the college, originally with the intention to display it as the Class of
1903 had wished. They had to change their plans, though.
"Almost as soon as we found it, we heard about people who
said they were going to steal it again," Verigan said. "We had to hide it in the Monmouth
Armory until Thiessen decided what to do with it."
What he decided was to embed it, nose-down, in concrete and
bury it in the ground in front of McMichael Science Hall, so he "could keep an eye on it" from
his McMichael office window, and so engineering students could use it as a measuring
benchmark.
That still didn't stop wannabe thieves, though.
"Even though it was buried in that concrete, someone tried to
steal it not long after we put it there," Verigan said. "They tried pulling it out of the
ground with a truck and a chain, but it didn't work."
The cannon stayed there, anchored to the lawn in front of
McMichael, until the construction of Wells Theater displaced it in 1989. With the help of a
front-end loader from the City of Monmouth Public Works Department, it was dug up and
replanted in front of Haldeman-Thiessen Science Center, named for the man who led the search
party that succeeded in finding it.
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Doc Thiessen's
cannon now reposes in the lobby of the science building that bears his name.
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It was finally rescued in the summer of 1996 thanks to MC
student Sytil Harker and her father, Don, a member of Scott’s Battery, a Civil War reenactment
group based in Davenport, Iowa. With the help of history professor William Urban, the gun was
excavated, freed from its concrete plug and restored to firing condition.
A new carriage was built with a gift from David Mueller ’84,
his wife, Laura Van Kell Mueller ’86; John Mueller ’90, Kristina Mueller, and Patricia Kennedy
Mueller, in memory of Kenneth D. Mueller ’60.
The gun made its long-awaited debut in September 1996, when
Scott’s Battery used it during a Civil War battle reenactment in Scott County, Iowa. It
debuted on campus that October, providing what may have been the loudest start of any game in
Fighting Scot football history.
While Scott’s Battery had hoped to use the gun for summer
reenactments, obtaining an insurance waiver for additional firing has thus far proven too
costly. For now, Thiessen's cannon will reside silently in the lobby of the building that
bears his name.
Harker estimates the cannon to be worth about $40,000 as an
antique. But as a piece of Monmouth College and American history, he said, it's priceless.
"That gun would make an incredible center of a display about
Monmouth College in the Civil War, and Monmouth has such a deep history on the Union side in
the war."
Indeed, Urban said Monmouth sent 232 of its students--both
male and female--to fight in the war. That figure was surpassed only by Amherst (263) and
Dartmouth (464), much older colleges with much larger enrollments. One in eight MC students
was a casualty in the war. So few students were left in the college that President Wallace
declared, "we must educate, whether there be peace or war."
The Monmouth unit was the 83rd, commanded by Abner
Clark Harding, a trustee of the college. At one point, it was stationed in Tennessee to
protect the rail line to Chattanooga. It was harassed often by local night raiders and
enlisted the help of local freed slaves to tell them who was behind the activity. When they
arrested the raiders, an alarm went out among the white population and prompted Confederate
President Jefferson Davis to issue a proclamation that all Monmouth College students captured
in Tennessee should be hanged immediately.
Check out these other interesting MC
Historical Pages:
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