Watch this boy find and defuse a rare Civil War artillery shell

Britain Lockhart, the teenage treasure hunter and American history preserver behind the YouTube channel "Depths of History," recently made his most important and dangerous discovery to date — a live 20-pound Civil War-era Parrot artillery shell.

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The teenager found it while scanning for bullets and canister shots left behind by Union and Confederate soldiers in the Tennessee countryside. He nearly missed his discovery because he'd dug so deep that he wanted to quit.

"I got about 20 inches, and I was like, I gotta give this hole a break," Lockhart said in his video. "I went over there and dug up one more bullet, and I was like, okay we can come back to it."

"So I removed a rock, then we went into another field and started hunting, and I came back to it and ya'll can't even believe this," the excited teen added. "I think I have a whole shell down in the hole."

Lockhart was right; the shell was 3 feet under the earth. He pulled the entire live round to gasps of astonishment from onlookers off camera. "That's the biggest find out here," said an off-camera voice.

Worried that the round could explode, Lockhart took it to expert Steve Phillips to defuse and preserve the shell. Phillips is a relics legend who has defused over 2,000 cannon balls, according to Lockhart.

"People think that if they drill one under water, it can't blow up," said Phillips. "That's not true, people have been blown up under water while drilling them with their hand."

While cautiously preparing the shell to drill, Pillips wisely summed up his experience, "you just have to think it might blow up."

This YouTube video shows how Britain Lockhart finds, defuses, and preserves a Civil War-era artillery shell.

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