From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for June 19, 1989:

A Lawrence youth was seeking a second opinion on an object he had discovered while digging in his parents’ garden. Parish Sneegas, 12, had been doing some yard work at the family home at 519 Louisiana when he had discovered a cast iron sphere which he believed to be a cannonball. Carlyle S. Smith, Kansas University professor emeritus of anthropology and curator emeritus of Dyche Museum, had met with Sneegas recently to inspect the find. Using an original armaments manual from the Civil War, Smith determined that the sphere was not, as Sneegas believed, a cannonball from that era. “It was much too small and light,” Smith said. “It weighs only about 3 1/2 pounds. The smallest cannonball used in the Civil War weighed 6 pounds and was 3.64 inches in diameter; this one is much smaller…. I suspect it was a weight in some mechanism, perhaps on a clock.” Sneegas had agreed to take Smith’s advice to find a second opinion. “We’re going to the state archeologist,” Sneegas said. “I don’t think it’s a grandfather clock weight; I really do think it’s a cannonball.”