This happened in Chesterfield County, where I once edited a weekly newspaper. A Civil War buff is killed by one of his antique explosives. This surely would have been the lede story this week in The Chesterfield Gazette if it were still in existence.
As people in Raleigh know, you can’t assume any artillery shell is a dud, no matter how old it is. Here’s more from Chesterfield:
Samuel H. White, 53, of Chesterfield County, who sold Civil War artillery shells, cannonballs, bullets and other artifacts through his Web site, was fatally wounded by a blast that send a large piece of ordnance flying through the front-porch roof of a house a quarter-mile away …
According to White’s Web site, he claimed to have disarmed, cleaned and preserved about 500 artillery projectiles “and still have all my fingers (I must be doing something right, knock on wood)!”
