FLORENCE, S.C. — Salvors who picked over a Civil War gunboat probably thought the cannons were with the rest of the wreckage in a South Carolina river.

Instead, three mighty artillery pieces belonging to the CSS Pee Dee were back upstream. The guns had been thrown overboard by the Confederate crew, which didn’t want them to fall into enemy hands, before they set the boat on fire.

For 150 years, the cannons were burrowed in sand and mud that formed protective cocoons.

That isolation ended Tuesday when a team of University of South Carolina archaeologists used heavy equipment to raise 35,000 pounds of iron weaponry from the Pee Dee River.

They are headed to a lab for a couple years of conservation and, eventually, display at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs building in nearby Florence.

Source: CNN