Cool Finds

A Man Used This Civil War Artifact as a Paperweight on His Desk. The Bomb Squad Told Him It Was Actually a Live Explosive

The device turned out to be an artillery shell designed for a Parrott rifle in the mid-1800s. Experts safely detonated it at a firing range near San Antonio

Ellen Wexler | Writer and Special Projects Editor

August 3, 2026 3:40 p.m.

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The artillery shell had been cast for combat during the Civil War. But more than 160 years later, it became something new: a decorative tchotchke sitting on the desk of a Texas man named Steve Martin. He had acquired the object from his son, who’d stumbled upon it during a fishing trip. Martin decided to use it as a paperweight.

For several years, the unusual keepsake served as a conversation piece, always piquing the interest of guests. “Everybody that comes in there wants to pick it up, and look at it, and handle it,” Martin tells KABB’s Destany Fuller. “We all thought, ‘Well, it’s some kind of dummy bomb.’”

That perception changed last month, when Martin started making small talk with a truck driver. The man, who had a military background, told him that the artifact didn’t look innocuous. He thought that it just might be a live artillery shell.

Martin called the Atascosa County Sheriff’s Office, explaining that he had a suspected explosive on his hands. Later that day, explosive disposal experts from Lackland Air Force Base arrived at his residence. According to a statement from the sheriff’s office, a team of emergency medical personnel also assisted in the response.

After a careful inspection, the experts delivered their verdict: The object was, indeed, a live Parrott round, an explosive used during the Civil War. Martin was unnerved to learn that his supposed dummy round had been dangerous all along.

“Now I’m thinking, ‘Well, the thing’s making a dummy out of me, right? Who’s the dummy here?’” he tells KENS 5’s Zack Briggs. “All this time, I’d had that antique bomb there that potentially could have exploded.”

The shell, which weighed roughly 20 pounds, was built for a Parrott rifle, a muzzle-loading cannon designed by inventor Robert Parker Parrott in 1860. According to the National Park Service, this gun was “used with devastating effect by the Union against Confederate-held Fort Pulaski in 1862 and against Fort Sumter from 1863-1864.”

Experts brought the Parrott round to an explosives range at Camp Bullis, a military training site and firing range north of San Antonio. There, more than 50 miles from Atascosa County, they safely detonated the device.

“It’s amazing that those things are still turning up almost 200 years later,” Eric Kaiser, deputy chief at the Atascosa County Sheriff’s Office, tells KENS 5. “People stumble across ordnance from time to time, but usually it’s not anywhere near as old as that one was.”

Martin was disappointed that the experts couldn’t preserve the artifact. In the future, however, he plans to be more careful about the unusual items he displays on his desk. “If somebody hands you something,” he tells KENS 5, “it might be a hot potato.”

Surviving explosives from the Civil War are rare, but they do surface from time to time. In 2021, a Maryland resident told authorities that he might have one in his possession. It had been a gift from a family member, who’d found it near the Monocacy National Battlefield. A bomb squad safely detonated it.

“The unexploded military ordnance was determined to be a live cannonball round used during the Civil War,” the Office of the Maryland State Fire Marshal said in a statement. “As proven today, the finding of military ordnance from the Civil War is not uncommon in Maryland, and these devices pose the same threat as the day they were initially manufactured.”

In 2023, an archaeologist discovered a ten-pound artillery shell buried at Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania. He’d been surveying the area with a metal detector and found the explosive about 20 inches underground. Experts blew up the weapon in an empty area of the site.

Meanwhile, explosives from World War II routinely surface all over the world. In 2024, a man found a 1,100-pound bomb in his daughter’s backyard in England; 10,000 residents evacuated the area before experts safely detonated the device. A 550-pound ordnance exploded at a regional airport in Japan later that year. (Nobody was hurt.) In March, another 550-pound bomb was uncovered during construction in Dresden, prompting 18,000 to leave the area—the largest evacuation of its kind in the German city history.

Ellen Wexler is a staff writer and special projects editor, digital, for Smithsonian magazine.