Evening star., 1941-05-18
A Bolder Enterprise

venture III gun IuiiIililS. lHt guns Idu
been sent to our town by the govern
ment and the plan had been to build
with them sort OF picket fence about
the statue of our own great man and
Civil War hero, General MCPHERSON.
The General, as all students of our
Civil War know we'll enough, was
killed before Atlanta He was General
William Tecumseh Sherman's chief
lieutenant in the long march, with its
many battles, from Nashville south.
over mountains and rivers, to Atlanta.
1t was Gone With the Wind for him
there. One day he rode out to look
over the battle line before the be-
leagured city and Inadvertently rode
into a group of enemy pickets and
was shot.
The body was brought home to our
town and bronze statue erected to
him in our graveyard. 1t stood upon
a square pedestal upon a plot of rising
ground in the graveyard and faced the
old Maumee Pike and the town. The
General had an arm raised and looked
very stern and dignjfied.
The old Mcpherson homestead,
from which the young and brilliant
boy had gone off to West Point, was
next door to our graveyard, and in my
day, as boy there. the farm extended
back along the side of the graveyard.
The land had been rather let 60 to
ruins. | believe the widow of the
General still lived in the old house,
which was neatly kept and painted
white, but if she did live in the house
| never saw her. Some way back from
the house there was an old barn, I'M
painted and with doors sagging.
As for the guns, they were heavy
Civil War rifles and were packed in
long coffinlike boxes. When they
arrived in our town they must have
been unloaded into the deserted
Mcpherson barn, and there they
stayed. The picket fence about the
Generals monument never was built.
Treasure Trovei
IT WAS that same Toughy McClary,
my fellow actor on the station lawn,
who discovered the guns. He was, l
dare say. prowling about. Even as a
small boy he had become a hunter
and always managed to borrow a shot
gun when he wanted to go out hunt
ing rabbits or birds. 1t may be that
a rain came up when he was hunting
on the Mcpherson farm and that he
sought shelter in the old barn. At any
rate there were the guns, now quite
forgotten, in the coffinlike boxes.
He proceeded to pry open one of the
boxes, and found all this treasure lying
before him. The guns had been packed
in heavy grease and were still in fine
condition, and it must have immedi-
ately occurred to Toughy that such
a gun, sawed off and the rifling bored
out, could be made into more or
less effective shotgun for hunting.
Toughy was excited and, as l was
his friend, he came to me to report his
discovery. He had already consulted
one Carter. a man of the town who
had small shop in which he repaired
lawn mowers and did other machine
repair jobs. Such a rife as Toughy had
seen in the MCPHERSON barn could be,
it seemed, transformed into shotgun
at a cost of twenty-five cents.
But now a great question of state
arose to be decided. To whom did
the guns belong? Toughy and l had
several long conferences over the
matter.
Would it be stealing to take some
of the guns out of the barn and trans
form them into shotguns?
They will only rust away lying
there in the barn.