After speculation and an inconclusive search attempt by a Dartmouth earth sciences class, Hanover Police officer Rick Paulsen has laid speculation surrounding a missing World War I cannon to rest. Last week, he told earth sciences professor Leslie Sonder that the cannon had been found, not under Memorial Field, as rumored, but in the backyard of a professor's son.
In April, acting on an anonymous tip from a dying alumnus, Paulsen located a World War I"era ammunition carriage beneath the bleachers of Memorial Field, prompting a search for the cannon that once sat atop it. The tipster claimed to have buried the cannon under Memorial Field in the 1960s after stealing it from the Vermont Veterans' Home in Bennington, Vt.
As police searched for the cannon, additional rumors circulated, including talk of a cannon given to Dartmouth by the French. With that suggestion, the possibility arose that there may have even been two cannons.
On April 29, Sonder investigated Memorial Field with her Earth Sciences 64 class using a magnetometer. The results of the search were inconclusive, and the class planned to return later in the term with a ground-penetrating radar.
Those plans changed when Paulsen discovered the cannon above ground.
"It was sort of anticlimactic," Sonder said.
According to Sonder, the cannon that Paulsen located was a match for the ammunition carriage found under the stadium. It was not stolen from the veteran's home as part of a prank, but was owned by the College and had been given to Dartmouth by France after World War I, Sonder said.
In an e-mail to The Dartmouth, Nick Smith '09, one of Sonder's students, said the cannon was given in appreciation of the Dartmouth students who fought in the war, noting that a plaque by Memorial Field's west entrance lists these soldiers' names.
Sonder said the cannon had been on display at the field and had been stolen "a fair amount," but added that the cannon was always recovered by the College. Eventually, Sonder said, the College became annoyed at the inconvenience of the repeated thefts and turned the cannon over to a professor, who in turn left it to his son when he passed away.
"They gave it on a more-or-less permanent loan, to get it out of the way," she said.
Although it would have been more exciting to find the cannon under the field, Sonder said the hunt was the "perfect" project for her nine-student geophysics class.
The class measured the magnetic field of the Earth in the probable locations of the cannon's burial, because the field is influenced by magnetic objects around it. The cannon, which is primarily made of iron and steel, would have generated a strong magnetic signal, Sonder said. The magnetometer, however, also sensed the magnetization of objects such as I-beams and underground cables, leading to ambiguous results.
"This was not a canned exercise," Sonder said. "There was no known answer."
Smith said the class was open-minded, but skeptical of finding anything at first. It was a surprise, he said, when the magnetometer indicated that something unusual might be present.
"The class seemed to get really excited about finding something, as if it was buried treasure," Smith said.
Scott Linton '09 said that, as the project unfolded, the class realized the search was going to be a larger endeavor than they had originally imagined. Heightening the anticipation were camera crews that had come to watch the class work, he said.
"After about three hours working down there with camera crews around, we realized it was not going to be as easy as just bringing a magnetometer down there," Linton said.
Smith said the class was disappointed when Paulsen informed the class that the cannon had been found.
"While we no longer had to write up the lab report, I think we were all a bit bummed that we weren't going to prove one of Dartmouth's many legends to be true," Smith said.
The connection to the veteran's home, which had been the primary theory behind the cannon's existence, seems to be an urban legend, Sondor said, and nobody knows where the veteran's home cannon might be.
"And that's the sad end of a cool story," Sonder said.
Paulsen's next project, Sonder said, is to look for "some old bomber that's crashed." It will be at least two years before they go forward in the search, but Sonder said she could foresee her classes and Paulsen working on joint efforts in the future.
Calls to Paulsen were not returned by press time.
