- A South Texas man contacted the Atascosa County Sheriff’s Office after a military friend visited his home and suspected that what the owner had always believed was a dummy Civil War artillery round might actually be live.
- Deputies sent an explosive disposal team from Lackland Air Force Base to investigate and confirmed the military friend’s suspicion was correct.
- The device turned out to be a live “Parrott round,” a type of artillery shell fired from the Parrott rifle, a muzzle-loading cannon widely used by Union forces during the Civil War, invented by West Point graduate Robert Parrott.
- The round was safely transported to an explosive range at Camp Bullis in San Antonio, where it was properly disposed of by the disposal team.
- No one was injured, and no charges are pending against the owner, who had simply never known what was sitting on his desk.
- The Parrott rifle came in a range of sizes firing rounds from 10 to 300 pounds, and the size of this particular paperweight was not disclosed.
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