When the West Windsor Select Board in Vermont started talking about getting rid of the cannon that was in front of town hall, people in town let the board know they were opposed to the idea.
“It was actually a bit of a kerfuffle in town when we were announcing we were thinking of removing it from the town hall,” said Select Board Chairman Mark Higgins. “And people came down to speak on the issue. You know I remember one gentleman in particular saying he always enjoyed that it showed the defiance of West Windsor to Windsor because it points up the road to Windsor.”
The West Windsor cannon arrived in town in 1980 when Danny Knowles moved to town and opened an automotive garage right along Route 44, which is the town’s main drag.
Every year during West Windsor’s Fourth of July celebration, Knowles would shoot off the cannon as the Independence Day parade finished up.
“Danny used to shoot it off every July Fourth, and everybody would anticipate that it was coming,” said Amy Yates, who grew up in West Windsor. “It was incredibly loud.”
“Danny used to shoot it off, every July Fourth, and everybody would anticipate that it was coming. It was incredibly loud.”Amy Yates, West Windsor resident
Yates remembers as a kid, watching Knowles shoot off the cannon, and then covering her own child’s ears when they were young.
For Yates the cannon was as much a part of the town’s Fourth of July celebration as the parade and fireworks.
“It was cool. Danny had a cannon,” Yates said. “The parade would finish, and Danny would load it up, boom! It was very cool.”
Deb Shearer moved to West Windsor soon before Knowles died. She saw a few July Fourth cannon fires, but mostly remembers the cannon standing sentry out on the lawn in front of town hall.
“Like my memory is it was outside of the town hall,” Shearer said. “I always remember it being there, and I remember the kids playing on it. I never even gave it a thought, I just thought it was a West Windsor cannon.”
When Knowles died in 2003 he gave the cannon to the town.
Notes from a Dec. 29 select board meeting from the year read, “Danny Knowles. Since his recent death the family of Danny Knowles approached Jim Kenyon to see if the town would like to have his antique cannon used annually during the fourth of July celebrations. The board accepted Danny Knowles’s cannon as a gift to the town from his family.”
As far as anyone can remember the town never shot it off again.
It was placed out in front of a town hall with a plaque that read, “W.W. 4th of July cannon, 2004, honoring Danny Knowles.”
Higgins, the select board chairman, said a few years ago a West Windsor resident raised objections to having a cannon, a symbol of war, in front of town hall.
The carriage base was also deteriorating, and the town didn’t want to invest money in it.
So select board voted to move it behind the town garage.
"I had always assumed that it was related to the service, maybe the Civil War,” Higgins said. “But after we moved it we found out that it came from a different place, and was not what one would have expected.”
When the cannon was sitting behind the garage, the town received a few inquiries from people who were interested in purchasing it, so town officials starting doing some research into its history.
Just before Knowles died, he tried selling the cannon. He had a deal, that apparently fell through, to sell it to a town in central Massachusetts.
Knowles was a former Hampden, Massachusetts police officer, and he told a newspaper reporter at the time that while chasing a suspect through the woods he tripped over a piece of metal sticking up out of the ground.
Knowles returned to the spot later, he’s quoted as saying, and without talking to the landowner, the Massachusetts cop dug up the cannon and hauled it away.
Higgins says when Knowles moved to West Windsor he took his cannon with him and started shooting it off on the Fourth of July.
“You know in my head he’s got a tow truck in the middle of the night, and he’s just grabbing this lump of metal that he kicked his foot on when he was chasing some guy,” Higgins said. “And, who knows, maybe it’s a different story for how he got it, but, you know, it shouldn’t be here is the conclusion.”
“It was like, you know, ‘this is a symbol of our community, and you shouldn’t be moving it,’ and to come to find out that it’s just something that was stolen stuck on the front lawn of town hall, basically."Mark Higgins, West Windsor selectboard chairman
On top of all that, a group of users on a military weapon website surmised that the cannon was most likely built in Sweden in the late 1600s, and was probably used on a Swedish naval ship protecting cargo.
So, Higgins says, no connection to West Windsor, or Vermont, or U.S. history.
And all of the shared memories, and assumptions, and connections to the West Windsor cannon are nothing more than a puff of smoke on a warm July night.
“It was like, you know, ‘This is a symbol of our community, and you shouldn’t be moving it,’ and to come to find out that it’s just something that was stolen stuck on the front lawn of town hall, basically,” Higgins said.
The board didn’t think it was a good idea to sell the cannon, since they never really owned it.
So they called the town of Hampden, Massachusetts, who sent a road crew up to Vermont to haul the cannon back to where it may, or may not, have come from.
This audio story was produced by Peter Engisch.
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