Archaeologists from the University of South Carolina and East Carolina University have found two large cannons from a sunken Confederate gunboat in the Pee Dee River and have identified where the Mars Bluff Naval Yard once stood on the east side of the river in Marion County.

State underwater archaeologist Christopher Amer and state archaeologist and research associate professor Jon Leader began work April 30. The project called for finding and, eventually, raising three cannons, each weighing upwards of five tons, that were once aboard the C.S.S. Pee Dee, as well as determining the location of the naval yard where the gunboat had been built.

Amer said the underwater research has been very successful, despite rising waters that have created a higher or more swift-moving current and lower visibility.

She didn't pay but $9 and change for her Rock Hill High School class of 1942 ring. But that doesn't mean Wilma Peebles hadn't missed that little ring for so many years.

“I remember Daddy gave me a $10 bill, and I had never held so much money before, and I got some change back,” Peebles recalled about getting the ring.

But 51 years ago, she was planting daffodils outside her Harmony Road house south of Rock Hill. Her late husband, Alton, had dug a trench for the bulbs on that day in 1958. The ring somehow slipped off, but it wasn't noticed that it was gone until later.