On July 4, Chad Mellen will fire off a piece of history.

Mellen, a Barrington resident, will light a 660-pound naval cannon that dates back to the War of 1812. 

Mellen said the cannon was on a ship that sank to the bottom of the St. Lawrence River during the war. The cannon — it is actually called a gunnade, as it has trunnions and rests on a carriage — was later recovered from the river, put on public display in New Hartford, NY, later left to rust and rot behind a public works garage in New York, and eventually rescued by Mellen’s grandfather. 

Most recently, the gunnade was renovated by Mellen’s son, Riley, as part of his Barrington High School senior project. 

And on the Fourth of July each year, Mellen rolls the cannon out of his garage, packs it with black powder and fires it off. (He also lights it on New Year’s Day each year.)

“It’s a blast. I’m not sure my neighbors would agree, but it’s a blast,” Mellen said. 

Mellen offered a brief history of the gunnade.

The 12-pound naval gunnade (the pound refers to the weight of the cannonball it fired) was most likely used on an American merchant sailboat that had been converted to a naval vessel at the Sackets Harbor naval shipyard at the eastern tip of Lake Ontario during the War of 1812. 

After it was recovered from the bottom of the St. Lawrence, the gunnade was put on display in New Hartford, NY. It was eventually removed from public display and dumped behind a public works garage in New Hartford.

In the late 1940s, Mellen’s grandfather, Raymond Mellen, was a member of the Village Board of Trustees in New Hartford.

“At the end of his tenure, my grandfather ‘liberated’ the cannon and brought it, as well as the rotted carriage, to his garage,” Chad Mellen wrote in an email to the Barrington Times. “It moved with him to Clinton, NY and stayed there until my father, Charles Mellen, picked it up in the mid 1970’s and brought it to our home outside Cleveland, Ohio with the vague idea of restoring it for the Bicentennial.”

Mellen said those plans never materialized, and the gunnade fell into even worse condition. 

But in 2010, the gunnade’s luck changed.

Mellen’s son, Riley, then a senior at Barrington High School, decided to restore the cannon for his senior project. Mellen and his family drove to Cleveland, and slowly loaded the quarter-ton relic onto a rented Uhaul open trailer.

“Before we came back I called the Barrington Police Department,” Mellen said. 

An officer answered and Mellen asked him a question: Was it OK to transport a non-firing cannon across state lines?

The officer pondered for a moment, then said he would need to check. A short time later, the officer called back with good news. He could not find anything in the codes that prohibited the transportation of the cannon… as long as it was non-firing. 

Mellen said the 10-hour drive back to Barrington was relatively (thankfully) uneventful. 

After that, Riley went to work on his senior project. He drilled out the cement that filled the barrel, and found instructions on how to remove decades of rust from the cannon — he filled a kiddie pool with a solution and ran electric current through it. In short time, the rust was gone. Then Riley constructed a new carriage for the gunnade to rest upon.

“He found an original blueprint online,” Mellen said, adding that the carriage was for a different style gunnade, so Riley modified it a bit. 

Riley finished restoring the gunnade and constructing the carriage, and then left for college — leaving the two pieces laying separate inside Mellen’s garage. 

Mellen, with assistance from his father-in-law, rented an engine block hoist and the two men assembled the 200-year-old gunnade inside the garage. 

And twice a year, the Mellen family rolls out the gunnade, fills it with a couple of ounces of black powder and fires it.

Mellen said it is pretty easy to roll the cannon out of the garage — “it’s downhill”.

Getting it back into the garage is another story.