Dead Confederate soldiers at the Battle of Antietam. (Alexander Gardner via Library of Congress)

Western Maryland is full of history, especially that of the Civil War. Some of the conflict’s bloodiest battles were fought there and, it turns out, not every shot that could have been fired was fired. That’s what a Sharpsburg resident found out yesterday after digging up an unexploded Union army shell while planting some trees in his yard.

The Herald-Mail of Hagerstown reports that J.D. Taylor Jr. was just doing some gardening when he stumbled upon the antique munition. Taylor’s home is about a mile away from the Antietam National Battlefield, site of the bloodiest single-day battle of the entire Civil War. Yesterday also was not the first time he has weeded out a bit of 19th-century materiel, though it’s been a while since the last instance:

“It looked like a torpedo without the fins,” he said.

Taylor said he wasn’t afraid to handle it.

“I said, ‘Oh my Lord, there’s another one,’” he said.

He had prior experience with another one found 30 years earlier and about 12 to 13 feet away.

Not only that, but after examining the shell the Maryland State Fire Marshal’s office determined that it had not been fired, and that the fusing mechanism was still intact.

Taylor called the Washington County Sheriff’s office, which in turn called in U.S. Army bomb technicians from Fort Belvoir, who then took the shell to a nearby field and set it off. “It made a decent boom,” Taylor told the Herald-Mail.

But you don’t necessarily need to live all the way out in the Appalachian Mountains to find antiquated munitions. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, excavating the Spring Valley neighborhood, used to turn up World War I-era chemical weapons left over from the neighborhood’s history as an Army munitions range, though agency says it has not unearthed anything since 2010.