The Elizabethtown Cannonball

Look closely at the brick wall and you will find a Civil War cannonball lodged in the masonry. It has been here, more or less, since the twenty-seventh of December in eighteen sixty-two. That morning Confederate cavalry under General John Hunt Morgan rode into Elizabethtown.

Morgan was on one of his famous raids, and his real target was the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, the Union supply artery running straight through town. A small federal garrison refused to surrender, so Morgan opened fire with his artillery. One of those rounds buried itself in the side of a downtown building.

The cannonball stayed put until a fire destroyed the block in eighteen eighty-seven, when it was recovered and kept as a relic. Years later townspeople set it back into the wall, as close to its original resting place as they could manage, on the public square across from the courthouse.