The National Registry of Known Surviving Civil War Artillery is a resource for communities, organizations and museums with questions about original cannon and mortars that could have been used in the Civil War.

Jim Bender has been the registry keeper since 2007. He succeeded artillery historian Wayne Stark. Dr. James Hazlett began the database in the late 1950s with a manual card file on National Park Service cannon.

Early contributors to the list included Edwin Olmstead and M. Hume Parks who, with Hazlett, published Field Artillery of the Civil War in 1983.

In the mid-70s Don Lutz, owner of Antique Ordnance Publishers, started entering cannon data on a big mainframe computer. Wayne Stark got involved in the early 1980s after taking an interest in cannon during a 1979 museum visit.

Stark made the registry his avocation and became the sole keeper of the artillery lists. He relied on artillery buffs to seek out undiscovered cannon and to verify ones that had been reported, making note of dimensions and markings and taking pictures for him.

The list continues to grow in the U.S. and abroad. Bender added seven new “finds” in 2011, through the assistance of others,  bringing the total to 5,755. There would be considerably more survivors if so many cannon had not been donated to World War II scrap metal drives.

Bender welcomes input about possible new findings and cannon sales and trades for the registry. He keeps a record of stolen barrels and details about many cannon, which can help answer questions about ownership.

He recently was able to tell a museum that was given a cannon fragment in 1920 the manufacturer and kind of cannon based only on the foundry number stamped on the rimbase fragment.

Bender can be contacted at 26633 Lawrenceville Rd., Sunman, IN 47041 and by email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..