Cape Girardeau, MO: The Return of “George” to Fort D.
“George”, the eighth known surviving original Woodruff gun tube, was welcomed back to Cape Girardeau, MO, at a reception marking the debut of its just-completed authentic replica carriage on Monday, September 9, 2024. Members of the Turner Brigade participated.
Among the guests were four of five great-granddaughters of Col. George Thilenius, commander of the local 56th Enrolled Missouri Militia, who brought “George” back from Pilot Knob, MO, where he had collected Union sick and wounded plus “all the guns, cannon, stores, etc.” that they could transport. The gun remained in the possession of members of the Thilenius family until the 1970s, when it was recovered by Dennis Bowers, then a teenager, from behind an abandoned house in Cape Girardeau. Dennis gave the unmounted tube to his brother Bruce Bowers, then a Civil War reenactor in Indiana, where he campaigned the gun in reenactments for twenty years. After the tube was identified by Turner member Randy Baehr in 2023 as an original Woodruff gun and the same gun as shown in two 1937 photographs of Fort D, Bruce sold the tube to the Friends of Fort D, who restored it and had it remounted on an authentic replica carriage.
Click here for more information on “George”‘s history and here for the general history of the Woodruff guns.
Click here, here, and here for local television news clips about the return of “George”.