The Spanish cannon that Three Oaks bought with pennies

In a little park off Maple Street sits a bronze cannon that once guarded a Spanish island half a world away. It is the Dewey Cannon, and the story of how it got to a town of fifteen hundred people in southwest Michigan is better than anything you’d guess from looking at it.

After Admiral George Dewey wrecked the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in 1898 — the first big American win of the Spanish-American War — captured guns came home as war trophies. One of them was offered as a prize. A national committee was raising money for a memorial to the sailors who died on the battleship Maine, the ship whose sinking helped start the whole war, and it promised the cannon to whichever community gave the most money per person.

Three Oaks won. The town raised about $1,400 — the largest per-person gift of any community in the country. For a place this size, that meant nearly everyone in town reaching into a pocket. President William McKinley himself came to dedicate the park on October 17, 1899, and the cannon was formally handed over the following June, with Helen Gould — the railroad heiress known as the war’s “Florence Nightingale” — there as guest of honor.

So the gun stayed. It has weathered more than a century of Michigan winters in the open, a chunk of bronze that started life defending Spain’s grip on the Philippines and ended up as the proudest thing a small farming town ever pooled its money to win. The annual Dewey Cannon Days festival still takes its name from it. Not bad for a war souvenir that the locals essentially bought with their spare change.