The exploded cannon of Nut Island

One of the Boston area's more unusual public monuments is the exploded cannon barrel flanked by two shells on Nut Island, at the tip of Quincy's Hough's Neck.

The tiny peninsula today is best known as the site of the sewage-treatment plant that failed so spectacularly and regularly the city of Quincy filed the suit that led to today's MWRA (and it still has a small MWRA pre-treatment facility for sewage about to be pumped nearly 5 miles under Boston Harbor to Deer Island). But in the mid-1800s, the remote spit served as a testing ground for Cyrus Alger's cannons, which his workers would regularly fire towards the sandy cliffs of nearby Peddocks Island.

Alger's C.A. Alger & Co. foundry was based in South Boston, along the shores of what was then South Bay, near West 4th Street (on what is today still called Foundry Street). In the early 1800s, Alger bought a large piece of largely marshy land along the bay (much of it thrown in by the seller at little cost because they thought it was worthless marshland), rebuilt a failing seawall, filled it in and built what eventually became the largest foundry in the United States (in 1850, he did lose an appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court over a wharf he built that went too far into the bay).

Alger's forges turned out all sorts of metal objects, but he specialized in cannons, cannon balls and fuses. He was a major supplier to the army in the war of 1812. In 1837, the foundry started producing a Howitzer that the Union Army relied on heavily in the Civil War.

Alger originally test fired his cannons in South Boston, but as the area became more populated (Alger himself lived next to his foundry, in a house with a large garden out back), he had to find someplace else to test the weapons.

And not all of them worked. The remains now sitting on Nut Island are of a "rifled Rodman cannon" that failed somewhat spectacularly, along with two of the shells it was intended to fire.