British Cannons and History

The Detroit Police Department's dive team found a cannon in the waters of the Detroit River while on a training exercise in July. A local towing company, Boulevard and Trumbull Towing, pulled the cannon from the water, a true first for them, having been accustomed to dealing with submerged motor vehicles. Joel Stone of the Detroit Historical Society has identified the cannon as British. It will be kept in water to prevent rust, and will be displayed at either the Dossin Great Lakes Museum or the Detroit Historical Museum. After all that, what do we have at the end of the day?

An old cannon. A piece of scrap iron.

We do not intend here to dismiss or discourage history, historical research, or the proper appreciation of history through historical artifacts. But it is just a cannon, and not the only one found in the Detroit River in recent years (four others have been dredged up). Has it occurred to anyone that maybe, just maybe, not everything old needs preservation?

Quite frankly, and we will conceded that this may be our affinity for baseball speaking, old Tiger Stadium merited greater consideration as importantly historical than a hollowed out stick of iron, yet didn't get it. Which isn't even to say the old Gray Lady at Michigan and Trumbull should have been preserved, only that it was rather summarily tossed aside in value while we're supposed to revere a cannon. There doesn't seem to be the proper perspective at work here.

One wonders what the cost of retrieval and preservation of the cannon may eventually run into, and would like to juxtapose this to the other needs of our citizenry. We hear ad infinitum about how much financial trouble the State of Michigan and the City of Detroit are in, yet somehow there's cash to deal with a historical artifact whose value is, at best, merely trivial.

True, the cannon will be forgotten quickly. But that doesn't address the questions raised by the event. Indeed, that near certainty magnifies them. Are our senses of historical importance and spending, whether public or private, out of whack? Mull that over when you pass by a water bowl which has an iron tube laying in it at your neighborhood museum.