Below is a fragment of 8" cannonball found on the Big Black River Bridge battlefield (May 17, 1863). The shrapnel was found on private property in 1999 by long time website contributor H. Arlan Heiser, great grandson of Sgt. John C. Hall, Company C, who fashioned a handsome mount for the relic. Arlan describes the item in 2016:

"...it was buried in a cotton field for almost 150 years. This top view [right] shows the thickness and the curvature of the exterior and interior of the piece. Shortly after I found the piece with a metal detector we stopped at a museum that had some complete 8 inch confederate canon balls on display. The radius of that ball and this piece are the same and we do know that the Reb's were firing 8" shells at the Yanks at the Big Black River."