A cautionary tale...
A long, long, long time ago, I was acting as the area director of the Peoria Area Office of OSHA, with jurisdiction over most of the central portion of the state of IL. Over a golden autumn weekend, my lovely wife drove up from Mount Vernon so that we could spend a whole day poking around a part of the state in which neither of us had spent much time in the past.
Our path took us all the way up north to the little town of Galena. Back in the early 1800's, Galena was the "lead capital" of the United States, shipping lead to the rest of the country and overseas. Once the lead mines gave out (and the river silted up), it turned into a sleepy little town with one great distinction: it was the "home" of Ulysses S. Grant, Union general and future president of the nation.
As a town, Galena isn't much. The downtown parallels the banks of the river, and much of it is down in a deep valley (which the river occasionally floods out). (The modern section of the town is up on the highway, on very high ground.)
The "upper rent" section of the late 1800's is located on the southern bank of the river, up on the slopes of the valley. Grant's house (a weedy kind of place, like his two homes in Saint Louis) is way up on the slope, overlooking both the river and a large rectangular park, quite a nice place back in the day.
Like all towns of its vintage, Galena has a shortage of downtown parking. (It also had a shortage of restaurants and rest rooms, but I digress.) After crawling up and down "Main Street" for a while, we finally parked up on the hill, by the Grant house.
The tour of the home didn't last long, and (bypassing the available rest rooms at the house (dumb mistake)) we soon found ourselves walking down the slope, towards the park and the foot bridges over the river.
On our way through the park, I noticed a number of "war memorial" artillery pieces scattered about here and there. The first two were uninteresting surplus anti-tank guns from World War II, pieces that are a dime a dozen and littering urban landscapes throughout the country. The third one was quite a bit more interesting (to me), being a secondary armament weapon from the Spanish armored cruiser Viscaya, sunk at the Battle of Santiago in 1898. (The Yanko-Spanko War is one of my areas of interest, and those guns salvaged from the ravaged Spanish "fleet" are scattered all over the landscape in some of the most surprising places.)
I could see a number of other guns, all set in concrete plinths, off at the eastern edge of the park. Since I had already spent a lot of time on my feet, and my bad leg was starting to affect my mobility, I was more than happy that my lovely wife volunteered to walk down and photograph the rest of them (I maintain a registry of such stuff) to save me the leg work.
I plopped down on the Viscaya plinth and watched as my lovely wife, power walking the whole way, marched down to the east edge of the park and briefly stopped at each piece. When she came churning back up the walking path, I got up and prepared to walk down to the town. However, things were just not that simple.
She had taken both her Polaroid camera (remember those?) and my 35 mm SLR along on the walk to take the obligatory photographs. Fortunate for me, or so it seemed at the time, she was unable to get the SLR to function. It turned out that she had only two exposures left in the Polaroid; she expended them both on the seemingly innocuous Civil War vintage weapon that appeared (from a quarter mile away) to be a dirt common 3" Ordnance rifle, the Civil War artillery equivalent of a cockroach.
What I saw in the photograph made me sit up and take notice. The photograph of the breech end of the Civil War vintage piece (one of the normal photo angles taken of such stuff) revealed, in ornate script, the legend "Blakely's patent.
In American Civil War annals, the Blakely rifles occupy a special niche. Made of steel in Great Britain, Blakely weapons were relatively uncommon due to the Union blockade, highly prized by the Confederacy for their penetration power, and generally used in situations where extraordinary accuracy, range and destructive power were in order.
Any Blakely rifle was an interesting piece of Civil War ordnance, and I was aware of only one of them located in the State of Illinois, in Rock Island. Had my lovely wife decided to walk in the opposite direction, she would have shot her last two photos at the generic anti-tank gun, would have described the Blakely as a "Parrott rifle" (her catch all term for any Civil War field piece without an interpretive plaque), and that would have been that.
I immediately moved off to more closely examine this rare item. The walk about killed me, but what I saw brought a smile to my lips.
As I said, Blakelys are rare and very thin on the ground. Not all that many made it through the blockade, and those that did are very well known, often by nicknames like the "Widow Blakely" at the Vicksburg NBP. And, none in Galena.
This one was special in about four different ways. First off, it was somewhere where "the authorities in the field" said it should not be. (The nearest known Blakely was at the Rock Island in the arsenal's museum and very well documented for all of its life.) Second, it was not painted all to hell (as is common with ACW monuments, the better to prevent rust of the wrought and cast iron metal in over half of them). (Of the rest, virtually all were made of bronze.) Third, unlike virtually every other Blakely, it was small, very small. Most of the rest were big weapons, used to punch holes in ironclad warships. And fourth, it was located in Galena, the home town of one US Grant.
Finally, there were the markings on the piece, or (rather) the lack of same. In addition to the Blakely's patent marking, there were two holes drilled partially into the breech of the piece, in the identical location where a plaque described in Ripley, the standard work on Civil War artillery, was attached to the long-considered lost Blakely rifle that fired the first shot to hit Ft. Sumter in 1861. (That particular weapon was a pre-war gift to the South by a Southron resident in Great Britain at the time, hence the fancy plaque.) The weapon was still in Charleston when Sherman visited the place during his march to the sea, and the last time it was heard of was when he sent it to Grant as a war trophy following its capture.
At that time, the piece was both drawn in some detail, and the inscription on the bronze plaque was recorded, as well as the maker's numbering, the weight of the piece and all of that. Then it vanished, to become one of the mysteries of the American Civil War. If Ripley said it was lost, then (by Gawd) it was lost.
And, here I had found it. I fired off about thirty photos of the thing, along with some with a pen across the muzzle (I had no measuring tape to verify the bore of the thing). Once we returned to Southern IL (where my reference stuff was - this was long before most everything could be found on the internet), it all checked out. Holes for a sight bracket (not common on small Blakelys)? Check. Holes for the plaque on the breech? Check. Overall information on the size and marking of the piece? Check. Calibre? Check. Weight (always a positive ID for artillery of the era, since each piece had slight casting and machining variations)? Dead on the money.
Next, I started trying to contact Ripley (who lived over in South Carolina). When a direct attempt (telephone) didn't work, I sent out a bunch of letters to others interested in the subject, and waited for the replies to come in.
The first five letters or so (all negative) had been answered by the time we took off on our spring break trip to camp at Pensacola FL, early the next year. On the way back, we passed through western Tennessee, where we doglegged over to the Shiloh NBP, a place I had only visited once in a driving rainstorm.
After the park visit, I scoped out the books in the bookstore. One that immediately caught my eye, titled Field Artillery Weapons of the Civil War, by Hazlett, Ohmstead and Parks (the first two of which had yet to answer my letters mentioned above), was a comprehensive overview of that portion of the ACW topic. And, the little Blakely up in Galena was (by its calibre) in that class.
I opened up the book, scanned down the columns devoted to the few small Blakely rifles known to exist (only about five hundred of all sizes were made, and most were large, ship and coastal artillery weapons), hoping to learn more. And I did.
In the short time between my discovery and my blundering across this book (a "vanity press" publication of a small Delaware university), I thought that I had achieved the equivalent of immortality among Civil War buffs, having found the very weapon in at the Genesis of the war and then lost to history for one hundred and twenty two-odd years. This was better than my patents (actually, my lovely wife deserves a good bit of credit for those - lotsa screening of written materials there), better than my professional recognition in my field of work, better than all of the musical stuff I had done up to that point (even the circus band).
But, there it was, in poorly reproduced typescript (the pages of the book are actually photo-reproductions of the original typewritten manuscript), "This rifle has been found, in Galena IL". Bummer.
I never was able to find out who had beaten me to the punch (both Olmstead and Hazlett shuffled off their mortal coils soon after the book was "published", and I didn't know the other fellow). But, it was clear from the copyright date on the book that someone had been there just a short while before me and had passed the information up to the folks known to be writing a book on the topic.
So, my chance at a slice of Civil War immortality went slipping away. And, since that time, I've been really careful with credit where credit is due...