Also near the hot shot furnace is this piece of a Rodman Gun! These guns, which were mounted at many American coastal forts following the Civil War as so very many of them had been manufactured, were (and still are) heavy. A 10" Rodman weighed over two tons, and a fifteen-incher tipped the scales at over ten tons. What to do when they were no longer needed? One could of course just leave them in place and repaint them black every couple of years to keep them pretty, but the thought was that new guns would need to be emplaced at these forts at some point, plus all that delicious iron could be melted down to make those new guns, or fencing, or awkward toys, or any number of other Victorian iron marvels.
In an age when horsepower was still the primary moving force (steam was of course in use after the Civil War, but getting such unwieldy contraptions to a tiny spit of sand in the Gulf of Mexico was probably deemed to be more trouble than it was worth), picking up and transporting Rodman Guns was a challenge at best: Why don't we just blow the things into little pieces, which will be easy to toss into a boat and take back to Fort Pitt Foundry for repurposing? Which is precisely what they did, but even "little pieces" of Rodman Guns proved to be relatively unmanageable. As such, Fort Massachusetts is blessed with a sprinkling of these attractive iron chunks.
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