Military
5
On December 22, 1968, Howard S. England and a small group of volunteers began an eight-and-a-half-year search at Fort Taylor for American Civil War artifacts, using shovels and a borrowed civilian construction crane, and within an hour they found the first iron artifacts. The artifacts had been buried in 1898 under the direction of Lieutenant C.H. McKinstry of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with some placed in the concrete face of Battery Osceola and others buried in the gun rooms in front of the battery's south face, a step that helped protect the new magazines and unintentionally preserved much of the fort's armament. England and his volunteers, whom he called sand hogs, excavated fill and rubble from the second level of Battery Osceola and uncovered two 10-inch Columbiads, an 8-inch siege mortar, and a rare 300-pounder Parrott rifle buried in the fill. In seven rooms excavated on the first level, they also found 10-inch Rodmans still mounted on their gun chassis, along with almost 7,000 round and cylindrical projectiles buried with the guns.
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