The three-inch ordnance rifle was the Union Army's cannon of choice during the Civil War, valued for exceptional accuracy and reliability and capable of leveling infantry lines and destroying enemy guns up to a half-mile away, while a skilled crew could fire three times a minute. A member of Lumsden's Confederate Battery said in 1864 that the Yankee three-inch rifle was a dead shot at any distance under a mile and could hit the end of a flour barrel more often than miss unless the gunner got rattled. This kind of cannon originated in the region in 1854, when John Griffen, superintendent of Safe Harbor Iron Works in Lancaster County, patented its manufacturing process, in which red-hot sheets of wrought iron were wrapped around a core, reheated, and then, after cooling, the core was bored and the barrel rifled. Congress awarded four of these cannon to York in 1874, and they originally stood in Penn Park flanking the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial before going into storage in 1975 for protection from weather damage and vandalism and arriving at this site in 2007 on permanent loan from Capt. Edgar M. Ruhl Camp #33 Sons of Veterans of the Civil War.