Perched on a bed of cement in Veterans Park overlooking Main Street, the town’s newly refurbished World War I 37-millimeter infantry field gun may soon have a partner.

According to Annette Cooke, the Lions Club in Salem had been looking for a project to tackle when they learned that the town had gone ahead with plans to restore one of the community’s two weather-beaten field guns in time for Memorial Day, thanks in part to a donation from Arthur Barnes, chairman of the Board of Selectmen. Though the club had tried fixing up one of the field guns in the past, they were unable to find a craftsman to construct replacement wooden wheels, Cooke said.

“I would say it was at least a year and a half that we had been thinking of (refurbishing the field gun) as a project. When I came to town the two cannons were (in Veterans Park) and every Christmas tree lighting ceremony, the cannons were getting worse and worse, and then they put them in the dirt and the wheels just rotted,” Cooke said. “We had tried to do that before Arthur Barnes tried to do it. We couldn’t find the wheels. We went to Pennsylvania and we went to Amish country, but we couldn’t find the wheels.”

After Barnes found, contacted and arranged for the Hanson Wheels and Wagon Shop, a South Dakota based carriage and wagon manufacturer, to reconstruct the wooden wheels for the first field gun, Cooke said the Lions Club followed his lead.

According to Police Chief Paul Donovan, one of the lead organizers of the project, the price tag for the wheels alone was $793. Now the club is preparing to have the Salem Department of Public Works sandblast and repaint the field gun, lay down a cement pad and a wooden block to keep the new wheels off of the ground.

“We all know we owe a lot to the veterans, and we figured by adding the second cannon, I think its just an extra nice touch for them. With everything in Iraq and Afghanistan, we thought it was a project that should have been done,” Donovan said. “I expected to find it in a hundred pieces, but it was pretty well intact. Just the wheels were shot, otherwise it was, ‘Let’s just get this done, and get it back out into the public.’”

Though the Lions Club hopes to have the second field gun in place and flanking the town’s veterans memorial in time for Veterans Day, Rick Russell, director of Public Works said it may take a little longer than that. Shorthanded and already behind schedule after nearly a month of rain, Russell said there are other jobs the department needs to get done first around the community.

“We are going to do our best ... We’re hoping to get it down (at Veterans Park) by Veterans Day, but we don’t know,” he said. “We’ll do the work and (the Lions Club) is supplying the money for the materials. We’ll prepare a site for it to go down at the common and we’ll pour a nice concrete pad and we’ll do what we did before so it matches the other cannon.”

Though no one can put a date to when either field gun came into the town’s possession, both artillery pieces date to 1917 and 1918. The field guns are two of the 3,217 pieces based on a French design manufactured in the United States during that period.

Cooke remembers Veterans Park when both of the field guns were on display back when she first moved to town in the 1970s, and looks forward to seeing them both back in their rightful place.

“It was beautiful when we first came in to town. I don’t remember the gazebo being put up yet then. It was just a little old cemetery. It was nice,” she said. “The guns were facing out of town and if anybody comes in, they were in trouble.”