Best 4th of July-Blowing Up an Anvil

“Oh, we didn’t want that Continent anyway.” Patrick Stewart on how Brits feel about the 4th of July.

Having spent the better part of my life in Texas, a part of the country that can be a tad warm on the 4th of July, I was pleasantly surprised by the climate in Minnesota. It was, as The Wife puts it, COLD. 50 degrees at night and 70 degrees in the afternoon-on the 4th of July. The expected high in Dallas today is 97 degrees-so not as hot as usual.

On the 4th of July we made a trip to Fort Snelling, where they were proudly blowing up an anvil. It seems that anvil shooting has been around since the Civil War and was once a standard event at 4th of July celebrations. Maybe there was a high mortality rate and they decided to opt for fireworks instead. Fort Snelling was not the only place we visited that was shooting an anvil on the 4th of July, but it was the only one we were present for.

At any rate, I had never heard of the art of blowing up an anvil before I visited Fort Snelling. I like all kinds of old touristy places, and Fort Snelling has a lot of people in costumes running around happy to get an extra ration of whiskey and thrilled by the concussion from launching an avil into the air.

This is the kind of thing The Mythbusters would like-blowing up stuff for no reason at all. There is a National Anvil Shooting Contest, and the world record for blowing up an anvil seems to be just over 400 feet. For some odd reason they don’t hold the contest on the 4th of July.

Blowing up an anvil is a good 4th of July activity, you don’t have to wait for it to get dark, which isn’t until almost ten p.m., and it is really noisy. I can only image the fun that the drunken soldiers at Fort Snelling used to have in the frontier days. I can imagine the Commander sitting down at his desk the next morning writing the I regret to inform you letters. He gave his life for his Country while engaged in fierce combat with an anvil on the 4th of July.

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