Dave Neel
Works at Moscow Landing
Tue Dec 5 07:02:47 2000


It is difficult to tell exactly how many guns were in the works at Moscow Landing, or how many embrasures had been constructed. Between the building of the house on the site, the construction of Highway 80 and Rooster Bridge and some additional moving of dirt which appears to have taken place on the north side of the old highway, the layout of the earthworks is somewhat of a mystery.

I have been told that a fellow pulled a truckload of "cannon balls" out of the works behind the house in the late sixties or early seventies.

There are, as I recollect, some dispatches from Moscow Landing in the OR, but I don't recall content.

The gun at the Sumter County Court House was moved there from Moscow Landing prior to the turn of the century. I base this on an old story that the gun was spiked after a healthy blank charge broke out more than a few windows when some wags fired the gun in honor of Grover Cleveland's election (gee, back in a time when the South desired a Democrat in office). This would appear to show the gun was in town before 1885.

The story I have heard over the years is that the Federals were collecting ordnance after the war, and that the Courthouse gun, and supposedly one other, were mishandled and ran into the river. Since they were obsolete, they were simply abandoned. It may be that they were simply pushed there at war's end by C.S. forces.

The gun in Livingston is a Model 1839 12-pounder Siege and Garrison Gun. It is an iron gun cast at the West Point Foundry in 1846, like its mate in the Vicksburg National Military Park. The Vicksburg gun, found in figure I-18 in Ripley's "Artillery and Ammunition of the Civil War," is marked "R.L.B. No. 21" on the muzzle face. I can't find any of my many pictures of the Livingston gun right this minute, but its muzzle is marked "R.L.B. No. 17."
R.L.B. stands for Rufus L. Baker, an Army Ordnance Inspector from 1813-54. I don't know whether this means the guns were cast in close order to each other, or merely inspected in close order -- probably both.

An article about the fort appeared in the Birmingham News in the 1940s, as did a local article in the Home Record in about 1980. The story about the gun being fired at news of Cleveland's election came from my grandfather. Spratt's history of Livingston mentions the gun being brought from Moscow on page 13.

Now I'll just have to go an visit the gun this weekend when I'm down home. Goodness knows I crawled on it enough in my youth to polish it with the seat of my pants!

Dave Neel