SAVANNAH, Ga. () — A museum in Georgia’s oldest city on Wednesday welcomed a truckload of treasures from the earliest period of U.S. history — 17 cannons that experts believe sank to the bottom of the Savannah River during the American Revolution and remained undiscovered for nearly 240 years.

Workers carefully hoisted the big guns one-by-one from the back of a truck and wheeled them inside their new home at the Savannah History Museum, which will put them on display just in time for the Fourth of July celebration of America’s 250th birthday.

“They look brand new,” said Andrea Farmer, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers archaeologist who was part of the team that researched and preserved the cannons. “They could pretty much be fired if someone wanted to.”

The artifacts were discovered in 2021 when a dredge scooping sediment from the riverbed as part of an Army Corps project to deepen Savannah’s shipping channel pulled up a cannon in its metal jaws. The crew soon dug up two more.

In the course of just over a year, a total of 19 cannons were hoisted from the location just downstream from Savannah, which is where Georgia was founded in 1733 as the last of Britain’s 13 American colonies.

After being pulled from the river, most of the cannons left Georgia for several years to undergo cleaning and preservation work at a Texas lab.

One of the Revolution’s bloodiest battles was fought in Savannah

Archaeologists initially assumed the cannons likely dated to the Civil War. But further research indicated they’re likely almost a century older and sank during the buildup to the American Revolution’s bloody siege of Savannah.

Savannah was under British occupation in the fall of 1779, when colonists planned an attack to retake the city with help from French allies.

When French ships carrying troops were spotted off the Georgia coast, British forces scuttled at least six ships in the Savannah River downstream from the city to block the French vessels.

The land battle that followed was one of the bloodiest of the war. British forces killed nearly 300 colonial fighters and their allies, and wounded hundreds more.

The Savannah History Museum sits right next to the battlefield. Its staff on Wednesday hoisted the cannons, weighing up to 1500 pounds (680 kilograms) iece, onto custom display mounts that staffers likened to giant wine racks.

The cannons will be part of a new exhibit on Savannah’s role in the American Revolution, which is scheduled to open Fourth of July weekend, said Samantha Moss, the museum’s curator.

“Our great team has been prepping for months — building mounts and planning how we can safely display these very large, very special artifacts,” she said.

Cleaning the crusty cannons took years

Each of the iron cannons emerged from the river covered by a thick crust of mud and minerals.

Two were left in that raw state and put on display at the museum. The other 17 were sent to Texas A&M University, which has a lab that specializes in preserving underwater artifacts. Its staff spent years painstakingly cleaning the big guns and coating them in paint and wax to prevent rusting and corrosion.

“A lot of them have scour marks on the side from anchors or dredging, so there’s some scarring on the cannons,” said Chris Dostal, a professor of nautical archaeology who leads Texas A&M’s Conservation Research Lab. “But most of them look pretty exceptional.”

Most of the cannons arrived with wooden plugs still sealing their bores, which remained packed with cannonballs and gunpowder charges.

Dostal said radiocarbon dating of the wooden stoppers placed them roughly in the late 1700s. His team shared the cannons’ measurements and other details with experts in London, who concluded three of them were very likely forged by the British military.

The rest peared to be of French design but bore no telltale markings. Dostal said he suspects those guns may have been cast in America around the time of the war.

Other artifacts found with the cannons included pieces of anchors and a portion of a ship’s bronze bell. Like the cannons, none of them bore engravings indicating which ship they came from.

That means many details of the cannons’ origins remain a mystery.

“You don’t have all of the information,” Farmer said. “You’re trying to piece it together as best as you can.”

Republicans could net about 10 additional U.S. House seats in the November elections if redrawn voting districts perform as they were intended. The question is whether that’s enough for the GOP to hold on to a majority in the chamber, where Democrats need to gain only a few seats to take control.

Political trends and historic patterns favor Democrats. President Donald Trump’s proval ratings are negative. And the incumbent’s party has lost House seats in every midterm election over the past two decades.

Nearly 145 million people — about two of every five U.S. residents — live in states with new congressional districts for this election.

Yet the mid-decade redistricting battle didn’t go as far as it could have.

Here’s a look at the states with new U.S. House ms:

Texas

Current m: 13 Democrats, 25 Republicans

Missouri

Current m: two Democrats, six Republicans

North Carolina

Current m: four Democrats, 10 Republicans

Ohio

Current m: five Democrats, 10 Republicans

California

Current m: 43 Democrats, nine Republicans

Utah

Current m: no Democrats, four Republicans

Florida

Current m: eight Democrats, 20 Republicans

Tennessee

Current m: one Democrat, eight Republicans

Louisiana

Current m: two Democrats, four Republicans

Alabama

Current m: two Democrats, five Republicans

RALEIGH, N.C. () — The Carolina Hurricanes got off to a fast start in their first Stanley Cup Final game in 20 years, though the Vegas Golden Knights regrouped to level the score.

Nikolaj Ehlers got loose on a rush on the left side and blasted a puck past Carter Hart on the game’s first shot, just 25 seconds in. He followed by getting loose on a breakaway off a feed from Jalen Chatfield and beating Hart again at the 12:08 mark to make it 2-0. But Vegas’ Shea Theodore got one back by firing the puck through traffic to beat Frederik Andersen at 13:28 of the first, then Ivan Barbashev beat Andersen from the slot 30 seconds into the second period to tie it at 2-all.

Ehlers’ first score marked the fastest Game 1 goal in a Cup final since Philadelphia’s Reggie Leach scored 21 seconds into the 1976 opener against Montreal.

“The building was already buzzing, but that for sure was pretty cool,” Ehlers said during an intermission interview on the ABC broadcast. “That was special. That definitely gave the arena a little more juice.”

Ehlers’ goal was the third-fastest in any Game 1 of a Stanley Cup Final, while the Hurricanes nearly added a second with defenseman Jaccob Slavin banging the crossbar roughly a minute after Ehlers’ score sent a charged home crowd into an eruption.

Tuesday’s game brought together a Vegas team chasing a second championship in four seasons and a Carolina team playing for the Cup for the first time since coach Rod Brind’Amour ctained the Hurricanes to the 2006 title.

The Hurricanes went 12-1 through three rounds to get here, sweeping through Ottawa and Philadelphia before taking the last four games of a five-game win against Montreal in the Eastern Conference Final. That made the Hurricanes the first team since 1983 to reach the Stanley Cup Final with one loss, and the first since the NHL went to best-of-seven series in all four rounds in 1987.

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