John “Pa” Matson
Civil War Cannon Maker
When retired electrician John Matson isn’t traveling the country with his family, he spends his days sitting in his favorite chair. Known to everyone around him as Pa, he lives in Kinsman, a small town just 5 miles west of the border between Ohio and Pennsylvania. Pa just celebrated his seventieth birthday and has spent his whole life here. On the day of my interview, I turned into his driveway and noticed the sign out in front stating “Ye Old Brick House” and as I entered I was immediately welcomed by his wife. She then escorted me into a cozy room at the back of the house with a wood burner where Pa was waiting for me in his favorite chair. He smiled and said, “Well, what do you want to know?” As we ventured further into the interview, I noticed just how little Pa said “I”. He rarely liked to talk about himself preferring to be included as part of a group rather than an individual.
Pa has always had an interest in American history and even has a stake in it himself. When I asked him who he admired from the Civil War era, he replied, “William Tecumseh Sherman. He’s on my family tree….he was a general in the army. In the Union army.” It turns out General Sherman is the brother of Pa’s great great grandmother. His family history doesn’t stop there when it comes to famous firsts. Somewhere on his mom’s side of the family, he is related to Ralph Waldo Emerson who led the Transcendentalist movement in the mid 19th century and another ancestor started the Ivy League school, Brown University. You could say it was in his blood to try something new.
He began making Civil War cannon replicas in 1990 when he met a man that owns a local machine shop not far from his house. The man introduced him to an organization called the North-South Skirmish Association which specializes in the shooting of live ammunition at designated targets. They have various competitions which has led Pa to travel to many historical sites. “I’ve been to Antietam, Harpers Ferry, Chickamauga, Perry’s Monument up in Erie, Pennsylvania. I’ve seen the ship Niagara which was his [meaning Oliver Hazard Perry who was a Commodore in the Great Lakes] from the War of 1812.”
The main grounds for competition, however, happen to be at Fort Shenandoah in Winchester, Virginia. It is a place where Pa has spent a lot of time with his group, the 15th Ohio, and making friends along the way. “I’ve been at it long enough that I know quite a few that are associated with the artillery….[here he’s describing his group’s grounds in Fort Shenandoah] We’re about, oh, a good half a mile from where all the main events go on so as we go up the road, you know, we see this guy at his campground and we wave Hi and stop and BS a little bit. And we go on and sometimes it takes an hour just to get there just by saying hi to everybody.” He went on to say it was “kind of like a fraternal organization.” An organization, I learned, that has up to 10,000 people show up for the main artillery competitions in the Fall and Spring.
Pa then took out a photo album which included pictures of an event he went to this past Fall. In them I saw pictures of people dressed in dark blue uniforms while jamming a ram-rod into a cannon during the competition. I later found out that each of these uniforms cost about $500. A pretty penny considering Pa had only started cannon making as a hobby. I asked if he shot for the Union and he replied, “No, we just shoot for ourselves down there, There’s no sides, it’s just shooting for a score.” The specifics of the cannon scoring include aiming at a target 200 yards away and they are given one hour to fire off twelve rounds. “It takes time because we do it safely. We wait and we sponge out the barrel with water and we gotta sponge it out with something clean so there’s no water in there. Just getting around to doing all this, it takes an hour to get twelve rounds off….We have a procedure for loading and handling the black powder. No smoking. Not that anyone does anyway. No open flames. Just being careful and knowing what you’re about. We seem to know that pretty well.” That safety seems to have paid off as Pa’s group has been named National Champions twice. I asked him if anything unexpected has ever happened while shooting. He smiled, leaned toward me and stated, “It always doesn’t go as planned when you don’t hit the target.”
Pa is involved with the woodworking part of making the cannon. The whole process can get pretty expensive in the grand scheme of things. He started work on his latest cannon in late Fall and estimates that with the carriage and the cannon itself the cost is close to $30,000. It’s a process which includes gathering plans from the National Park Service and learning how to make the cannon. “It’s a lot of talented people with good thoughts. A lot of input, what we do. Everybody has their own idea. We get together and discuss it. Sometimes pick on each other and stuff like that.” [he then chuckles and stares out the window in deep thought]
I took a more personal direction toward the end of the interview asking how he got by in hard times. “Just keep pluggin’ away. I worked at a place that went bankrupt and shut down. It was close to two years before I had a steady job. But I would always find something that would last a week, a month, or whatever would come along. That’s all you can do to get by.” I learned that Pa also has had to endure many health problems including a quadruple bypass surgery, a mild stroke, as well as the removal of his spleen. Despite this, he still continues to fight to keep up with his family traveling every summer to the camp they own in the remote wilderness of Canada. “Yea you gotta just keep pluggin’ away.”