Property owner discovers more than 200 Civil War-era cannonballs on his land

A Mississippi man found dozens of Civil War-era relics, including 200 cannonballs, buried on his property.

Harold Knight said he first stumbled onto the historical treasure trove while preparing a plot of land he owned along US Route 45 in Booneville, Mississippi for commercial development.

“I found one cannonball laying on top of the ground over here,” Knight told News 4 San Antonio.

“And I was telling someone about it and they said ‘ah, that could have come from anywhere.’”

The property owner allowed others to use their metal detectors on the land while he continued working on it.

The dogged search quickly found that Knight had been sitting on a whole treasure trove of Civil War-era artifacts. 

“They started finding a bunch, so I invited a couple more people to come out with metal detectors and that’s how I’d come up with about two hundred of them,” Knight told the outlet. 

The hundreds of 160-year-old cannonballs included grape shot, canister shot and case shot military munitions. 

Experts at the Booneville Rails & Trails Museum told News 4 that the projectiles might have landed in the field as the result of two Civil War battles fought in July 1862. 

Both the Battle of Blackland and the Battle of Booneville were fought on both sides of the city. 

However, further investigation would have to be done to definitively place where the cannonballs came from. 

Knight said that he believes that there are even more than the already two hundred cannonballs still lying on the property. 

“We still think there’s more here,” Knight said.