[CPProt.net] Pa. collectors stir unrest buying up community cannons

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

Pa. collectors stir unrest buying up community cannons 

August 14, 2005
By BEN DOBBIN 
The Associated Press 
GROTON, N.Y. - Since 1994, Bruce Stiles has coaxed towns from Nebraska to
New Hampshire to sell their Civil War cannons, iron and bronze sentinels
that have graced cemeteries and parks for a century or more.

His success in obtaining dozens of muzzleloaders for private collectors in
Pennsylvania stirs unrest wherever he goes, but usually after the fact.
Weeks or even months can go by before residents even realize their veterans'
memorial has been whisked away.

The sales patter went like clockwork in this central New York village last
summer. In a form letter, Stiles offered $10,000 for a 1,700-pound barrel
that had sat undisturbed since 1901 on a concrete pedestal at Groton Rural
Cemetery.

Left outside, it would someday rust beyond recognition, Stiles asserted.
Better to have it acid-washed, sandblasted, repainted and displayed at a
museum near Pittsburgh that is open to the public free of charge.

Some cemetery trustees didn't know what they had - a Parrott naval cannon,
one of only 78 known survivors from the 1861-65 war. Still, despite being
strapped for cash and haunted by bankruptcy for a half-century, the
association didn't bite.

Stiles next barraged secretary-treasurer Juanita Griffin with calls - "I
just got tired of running to the phone and having it be him again," she said
- followed within weeks by a sweetened offer of $15,000 plus a replica
cannon he valued at $5,000.

All along, Stiles advised that negotiations be kept under wraps. As he has
told other cemetery custodians and town boards across the country, he didn't
want residents getting riled up. Now he voiced another reason: If people
knew how valuable it was, the cannon would be at great risk of getting
stolen.

"Once we realized that, then we were concerned about theft and not saying a
lot to the public about its value," said association president Mary Flang.

The 12-member board approved the new offer and, within days, the cannon was
gone. Few villagers seemed to notice. Only this spring, when they heard
another rural New York town had sold its cannon to Stiles and then paid a
steep price to get it back, did this village of 2,500 people awaken to its
loss.

As it turned out, the cannon didn't belong to the cemetery association.

---

In the half-century after the Civil War, about 12,000 obsolete cannons were
donated to towns and veterans' groups. Many were melted down in scrap.m.etal
drives during the world wars, and fewer than 5,700 survive. At least 560 of
them, Union and Confederate collectibles valued from $20,000 to $200,000,
are now in private hands. A half-dozen collectors have each bought 20 or
more.

Stiles, 52, a businessman from Emmaus, Pa., works on commission for Kenneth
Watterson, a retired manufacturing executive whose 5-year-old museum next to
his home in Venetia near Pittsburgh boasts 26 cannons, howitzers and mortars
- the nation's second biggest private collection.

Watterson's Civil War Artillery Museum opens by appointment only, drawing a
few hundred visitors a year. He's now thinking of loaning his estimated $1
million-plus collection to a museum in Virginia but won't say if the move
was triggered by his divorce or by howls of protests he raised this spring
in upstate New York.

Cannons have quietly vanished from at least nine small towns across New York
since 1998. But very few of the sales created the sort of ruckus that
ignited in Kendall near Lake Ontario in March and put collectors under an
uncomfortable spotlight.

While many Civil War ordnance pieces were loaned out by the federal
government, the ownership trail has been muddied in a few hundred cases by
surplus sales of cannons to businesses that later resold them, said Wayne
Stark, who maintains a "National Registry of Surviving Civil War Artillery"
and has authenticated cannons for both municipalities and collectors.

"I like to see the stuff stay where it is - if it's being maintained," Stark
said.

But Stiles, in an angry defense of his activities when he finally responded
to repeated Associated Press phone calls, said, "All we want to do is
preserve the cannons. We're not doing anything wrong. The people that are
neglecting them are doing the wrong thing, the people who are letting them
rust, the people who are letting them get vandalized and stolen."

 
As for ownership uncertainties, he asserted: "It's who's taken care of the
cannon for the past decades that's the owner."

For Ben Jones, a local Air Force reservist preparing for deployment in Iraq,
it's not that simple. "They're not buying them from a junkyard or an antique
shop, they're buying them from cemeteries. I collect militaria myself, but I
don't go desecrating graves to get it," he said.

Jones joined hundreds of protesters in Kendall after the town board quietly
sold its 816-pound, cast-iron cannon for $15,000. Watterson sold it back for
$27,000, charging $5,000 for a now unused replacement built in Georgia. The
extra costs were covered by a New York state grant.

The Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, which is trying to drum up
support in Congress to quell bartering in cannons, noted a 2003 law makes it
a federal offense to "injure or destroy" armed forces' monuments on public
property or transport them across state lines.

In 2002, a history teacher discovered two bronze Napoleons in Summit Hill,
Pa., were replicas when he sent pupils on a muzzle-rubbing trip. Lawyer
Carole Walbert proved the cannons belonged to the borough, not an American
Legion post that sold them in 2000 for $70,000, and forced Watterson to
return them last year.

Cannons were gifts "subject to recall by the U.S. government," said Walbert.
"If cannons have been donated to a municipality or veterans' group, they
can't be taken by collectors in my opinion."

---

At $8 an hour, the cost of having two men mow the grass at Groton Rural
Cemetery all summer long nudged the cash-starved caretakers to sell their
long-silent treasure. If a cemetery association declares bankruptcy and a
town takes over, mowing is required just three times a year, said Flang, the
cemetery association president.

"It would not be long before markers would be overgrown," she said. "It
would not be a memorial to anybody that was buried up there."

While the cannon's worn brass plaque had stated that "this gun (was) loaned
by U.S.," nine months went by before most residents realized the original
barrel had been substituted.

"Now that I know, I certainly don't want a replica," said Athena Kaladros,
co-owner of The Red Door Coffee House. "That insults my intelligence."

Army veteran Tom Conger, 60, added, "The point is it's been there for years
and years and it should continue to be there. Why is it a piece of material
that someone should be allowed to sell for a personal gain?"

In fact, a search of historical records by a Groton real-estate attorney,
Jim Henry, determined the cannon wasn't the association's property. The
cannon was bequeathed to a veteran's post, and the circular plot where it
stood was donated to the town in 1901.

Henry wrote asking Watterson to return the cannon. Watterson agreed if he's
paid $23,000 - he won't take back the replica and wants $3,000 in commission
fees, Henry said. The association is seeking donations.

Left behind in other cannon-less towns, meantime, is a smoldering
resentment.

"New York is an easy target - these collectors know darn well they're going
to quadruple their profits," said Shirley Goerlich, 68, a historian in
Sidney, 70 miles southeast of Groton. That town's cemetery sold its two
Confederate flank howitzers to Watterson in 2000 for $35,000.

Their absence from a hilltop plot that Civil War soldiers built by hand "has
always been a thorn in my side," Goerlich said.

In third grade, she recalled, the first local World War II hero came home in
a coffin and her entire school "walked all the way to the top of Prospect
Hill Cemetery." While her toes pinched in new patent-leather shoes and her
ears pounded from a 21-gun salute, the nobleness of the occasion never left
her.

"I looked at those big cannons and I felt so safe," she said. "And I
thought, 'These are the people who protect us, and we must always honor
them.'"


August 14, 2005 12:24 PM