Someone fired the campus cannon at 1 a.m. It never fired again.

It's 1 a.m. sometime in 1913. A group of students fires the campus cannon.

It's the last time anyone ever does. College officials respond by filling the barrel with cement.

That cannon is Old Jeremiah, the one in Branion Plaza across from the UC that looks different every time you walk past. You've seen it in club colours, birthday messages and at least one very ambitious giraffe. Here's the story most students never hear.

It came from the sea

Old Jeremiah is a British naval cannon. It arrived on campus in the 1880s and first stood in front of Johnston Hall. You might hear it fought in the War of 1812. Nobody has proof, so file that one under legend.

Lost in the weeds

By the fall of 1955, the cannon had vanished. A student eventually found it dumped behind a campus building, buried in weeds, its base partly burned.

On Halloween night 1956, his classmates towed it back to its spot beside Massey Hall using a two-toned Oldsmobile and a truck. Campus security helped. Then they painted their class year on it, in their words "to make sure that everyone was aware of who moved it."

That might be how the painting tradition started.

Nobody could stop moving it

Once it was back, students kept wheeling it around campus. In 1973, engineering students moved it into Branion Plaza, and it was cemented to the ground for good. Pranksters have been out of luck ever since.

Thousands of coats deep

The cannon gets a new coat dozens of times a year, and some nights it changes hands more than once. By 2010, paint had built up in thousands of layers. An art student once stripped away about 30 years of it for a project.

Over the years it has been a Canada goose, a penguin, a dragonfly, a giraffe, a squirrel and even the Titanic. It has delivered marriage proposals, and at least once it asked everyone walking by: "Have you been debugged lately?"

Want to paint it? The unwritten rules

• Start after sunset. That's the tradition.
• Guard it until sunrise. Walk away and someone will paint right over you.
• Nobody can book it. It's first come, first served.
• Paint the cannon only, not the grass or the trees, and take your garbage with you.
• Think twice before covering a fresh tribute or memorial.

New students often paint it with their communities during Orientation Week. Fair warning: if a message is harmful, staff will paint over it.

So next time you walk past, look closer. There's more than a century of stories under that paint, and by tomorrow there'll be another layer.

What's the best paint job you've seen on it? Tell us in the comments.

The Cribb Team

Cover photo: Saforrest, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org