Hog Days Explosion
I was visiting my grandparents one weekend many years ago. My grandfather asked if I wanted to take a walk and see the place where he was born. I was amazed to learn it was just on the other side of the Hazel River from their current home of 40 years in Rixeyville. The area is known as Korea.
His old home place was now part of a larger farm. He freely entered a gate and headed up the hill to a grassy knoll where an old house and barn stood. It appeared he and the current owner had an understanding. He marched towards the house, while telling me how his father had built both structures. He beckoned me to look closely at the wood on one side of the house. It had oddly shaped pieces of weathered metal embedded in the siding. Grandaddy was excited to point these out.
Here’s the true story of an exploding Civil War shell, as told by my grandfather (with a bit of decoration added):
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At Home in Korea, VA 1920
I was about 10 years old. It was a crisp fall morning. The kind of morning where your breath hangs in the air and the frost makes every leaf crunch underfoot. For us kids, this was a wonderful time of the year. Not because of the beauty of the season, mind you, but because Mama and Daddy were too busy butchering hogs to keep a proper eye on us.
Hog butchering was a necessity for rural families, ensuring they had enough meat, fat, and lard to last through the winter. It was labor-intensive and a common part of farm life. For many, it was also a time of gathering and sharing work among neighbors.
Now, in a family of eight children, freedom from parental oversight was a rare and glorious thing. Normally, Ma had the eyesight of a hawk and the reflexes of a bobcat. But during hog butchering, she was too busy, elbow-deep in lard and sausage casings, to give us more than an occasional holler when we got too near the scalding pot. Pa was equally preoccupied, which left us to our own devices. And that’s a dangerous thing given the collective imaginations of half-wild farm kids.
About Hog Butchering
This particular hog butchering was a grand affair, as a neighbor family had come to help. Between our two families, we had about 12 children running loose and two babies in arms. Anyone familiar with children knows this was a recipe for absolute chaos. The older boys were helping with the butchering, when badgered by the adults. The older girls looked after the youngest children, when sternly reminded. But the kids in the middle were running, free of rein.
To further prolong the chaos, butchering wasn’t a one-day event. There would be two or three days of activity beginning at sunup and ending at sundown. It was usually done in the late fall or early Winter, after the first frost. This allowed people to take advantage of cooler temperatures for meat preservation. It was a communal activity, and multiple families worked together to process the hogs efficiently.
To begin, they would fatten the hogs for months, by feeding them scraps, corn and other farm grown feed. Butchering day usually began by heating water in a large kettle over an outdoors fire. They would dispatch the hog, quickly and humanely, and then bleed it. Next, they put the carcass in the large pot of water to scald and then scraped the hair off. Afterwards, they would eviscerate and section the meat. Then split it in half and hang it high in a tree overnight to cool as weather permitted. Finally, there was a day or two for processing, curing, preserving, storing and clean up.
Trouble was Brewing
So, the butchering process was in full swing. Then we got our hands on the artillery shell.
Someone had dug it up! I’m not sure who, but we were all equally eager to claim credit for the grandest discovery of the day. It was an old Civil War artillery shell, rusty and caked in dirt. It had a fascinating metal end that we all took turns poking at with sticks.
Some of the more industrious children were engaged in other activities. Like trying to see if they could get the pigs to eat discarded corn husks. I can tell you that was a purely pointless because pigs will eat just about anything.
But a few of us had decided that our newfound treasure needed further testing. I sat on the porch for a good spell whacking at the shell with a little hand hatchet. I was trying to chip away the rust. The shell remained stubbornly intact.
Then some kids began to see who could heave it the furthest. This was no easy feat. At some point, the shell got chucked back and forth in a game that I hesitate to call “artillery keep-a-way.” Eventually, one of the more enterprising kids got a bright idea. They threw it into the fire over which the pot of boiling hog was hanging. Our collective reasoning at the time was something along the lines of: fire makes things interesting.
The Explosion
Well, nothing happened. Not immediately, anyway. The fire crackled, the pot bubbled, and we all got distracted by other shenanigans. We thought nothing more about the shell.
Then, almost a full day later—BOOM!
The explosion rattled the entire farm. Most people had been in the house, enjoying a makeshift dinner. A few were still in the yard. Ma went tearing out of the house, wiping her hands on her apron. Her eyes scanned the yard for signs of injury and the likely culprits, which was all of us. Those of us outdoors were frozen in shock, staring at the wooden siding of our house. It was now peppered with what we would soon figure out were bits of Civil War-era shrapnel.
“What in the name of the sweet Lord in Heaven was THAT?!” my mother bellowed.
There was a long silence, as everyone suddenly became deeply interested in the dirt beneath their feet. Finally, one of the older kids hesitantly pieced together what must have happened. They pointed at the blackened spot where the shell had been. A quick check for casualties was made, and all was well on that front.
Ma’s eyes widened at the revelation, then narrowed dangerously. “My heart near stopped! Which one of you threw that thing in the fire?!”
At this point, the blame-game began: stammering, finger-pointing, and weakly worded half-sentences.
“Don’t hesitate!”, she warned. “All of you need to understand what you did and what could have happened!”
Then began the general shifting of feet and downcast eyes that always accompanies trouble of this magnitude.
Finally, Ma sighed and flung her arms wide in exasperation.
“Never mind, I’ll whoop all of you that’s mine!”
She immediately set out to do just that, as we all scattered like leaves to the wind.
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The True Story of an Exploding Civil War Shell, Retold Years Later
I heard my grandfather tell this true story one more time. It was years later, and the audience was his children and grandchildren. He enjoyed emphasizing one crucial detail that happened the day the shell was tossed into the fire. He himself had been sitting on the front porch, merrily banging away at the detonation end with the little hatchet.
“Now think about that! If I’d hit it just right,” he mused, “I wouldn’t be here to tell you all this story.”
The room went appropriately silent for a moment to honor the gravity of his point.
Then my mother, who always relished a chance to put her father in his place, spoke.
“Well, none of us would be around to hear the story anyway, Daddy!”
My grandfather opened his mouth, like a gasping fish-out-of-water, and then closed it. His expression went sheepish.
The entire family burst out laughing.
It’s a wonder any of us survive childhood. But then again, what’s a good childhood without a few brushes with disaster?
© 2025 Terry Housel. All rights reserved.
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