San Antonio's Alamo acquires original cannon used in 1836 battle

The original cannon was acquired in the leadup to the Alamo’s 190th anniversary celebration. Credit: Courtesy / The Alamo

The Alamo has acquired an original cannon used in the 1836 Battle of the Alamo, the 13-day siege in which Texian settlers fended off the Mexican forces of Santa Anna who aimed to reclaim Texas.

“This is one of the highlights of my nearly 14 years of working at the Alamo,” the Alamo’s Senior Researcher and Historian Kolby Lanham said on Thursday’s episode of “Stories Bigger Than Texas: The Alamo Podcast .”

The cannon is currently sitting in an electrolysis bath to undergo preservation work along with other battle-used cannons at Texas A&M University’s Conservation Research Laboratory.

Once preservation is complete, this cannon and other battle-used weaponry in the Alamo Collection will be on display in the future Visitor Center and Museum, scheduled to open in late 2027.

Alamo officials acquired the swivel cannon, which weighs roughly 90 pounds, as the historic Spanish Mission site prepares to celebrate the battle’s 190th anniversary on March 6. This is the 11th battle-used cannon in the Alamo’s possession.

Career renaissance

How the latest cannon in the collection came to be acquired is quite a story. As it turns out, this piece of history had quite the second life, including a career renaissance as a bird bath.

The artifact was originally discovered in 1852 when Samuel Maverick, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence built a home adjacent to the northwest corner of the Alamo wall to be near friends who fell in the siege, according to officials with the landmark. At one point, Maverick found a cache of cannons buried in the yard of the property, where the Hotel Gibbs sits today.

This particular cannon then ended up at the Maverick family’s Sunshine Ranch in Northwest San Antonio, where it was used as the base of a bird bath.

The cannon disappeared in 1955 and remained missing for decades. That is, until the Alamo recently received a call from a Maverick family relative in Corpus Christi interested in donating the item. Lanham and chief Alamo conservator Pam Jary Rosser drove down the very next day to take the archaic armament back home to the battle site.

“It was just one of those moments that you’re looking at an artifact that had been gone and out of our possession for a very long time,” Lanham said in a statement. “To be able to see and touch that again was just unreal.”

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San Antonio’s Alamo acquires original cannon used in 1836 battle

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