A bomb squad rushed to a suburban Atlanta home to check out a Civil War cannonball said to be found in the yard. I now toss you the rest of the story

Metal ball had been moved into a bucket in a Marietta, Ga., shed (Cobb County Police)

The bomb squad in Cobb County, Ga., is called in two to four times a year following the discovery of metal objects that look like Civil War ordnance.

It’s hardly surprising, given the amount of combat, artillery and troop movement in Cobb and neighboring Paulding County in summer 1864.

“We deal with Civil War ordnance more than other local bomb squads due to Kennesaw Mountain, Cheatham Hill, Pickett’s Mill and other historic sites,” says Cobb County Police Sgt. Joel Cade, who heads the squad.

Such was the case in mid-December, when police in Marietta, the county seat, reached out to the squad.

A resident in the eastern part of the city had called authorities about some items she had found, according to the Marietta police report, which listed the incident code as 89L: BOMB DEVICE LOCATED

“(She) advised that she had located multiple objects that she thought could be explosive devices," wrote one of the responding officers. "(She) advised that the objects were large, round metal objects and that she had located throughout the side and back yards,” the report says. “(The woman) further advised that she had moved one of these objects into a bucket in the shed.”

The Marietta officers thought the item resembled a cannonball. The home and residents on the street were told to evacuate. Traffic on a stretch of a larger road was temporarily blocked. The officers called the bomb squad.

Cade and others rushed to the scene and dealt with the situation.

A couple weeks later -- after I reached out to authorities following a media report --  Cade emailed me about what they saw. It wasn’t what I was expecting.

“It was very clean when we took possession of it. It was in the townhome’s back storage closet when Marietta police took it and placed it into a bucket. The complainant alleged she found it in the ground but could not explain why there was no dirt on the ball,” he wrote.

The bomb squad, citing training and similar calls, determined the solid ball was non-hazardous. And it had no fusing or charge.

So what is it?

Wait for it…..

A shot put ball. 

All of 4 inches in diameter and weighing about 15 pounds (below). To the layman, it sure looks like it could be a cannonball. 

Great for sports competition, but not the field of battle (Cobb County Police)

That raised more questions and I fired a few more back at Cade, who got back with me a few weeks later.

“We concluded it was a shot put from prior cannonball calls we have had and compared it to resources we maintain in our files,” Cade replied. “The ones we have been called out to in the past that were adjudicated as cannonballs have a different texture to the iron, and they have prominent fuze wells.

“Additionally, shot-put sizes can vary (men’s, women’s, junior’s) but I haven’t seen one the same size as the cannon balls we have recovered in the past.”

“The spanner wrench holes with removable plug, opposite welded plug, weight/diameter and good condition led us to the conclusion it was not ordnance. Additionally, as an extra step, we used high energy radiography and looked inside the ball, no fillers or fuze was seen.”

So there you have it.

Of course, a whole lot of real Civil War ordnance has been recovered in metro Atlanta over the years.

Charlie Crawford, president emeritus of the Georgia Battlefields Association, said many were found during the construction of downtown Atlanta buildings and sites. Others were dug up in northwest Atlanta. “Those shells were probably from the U.S. artillery massed northwest of the city during the August 1864 bombardment,” he said.

The area home to the shot put ball may have been crisscrossed by Federal and Confederate artillery units during the Atlanta Campaign. And there was artillery firing somewhat in the area, and an errant shot may have landed.

But that scenario proved to be moot in this case.

In 2022, Bomb squad members gingerly removed this round from the Kennesaw battlefield (NPS photos)

One of the more recent publicized discoveries of an actual shell in Cobb County came at Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park in February 2022. The county police bomb squad took custody of the Parrott round but later returned to the park after it had been rendered safe and inert.

Officials implied the shell was left intact, a rarity after bomb squads are called in. Usually, they take an object to a safe location and detonate it.

In 2009, a contractor found 42 artillery shells south of Atlanta, near Lovejoy.