Origin of name "Columbiad" for early US seacoast artillery?

[cannonmn]

A friend of mine has been looking for prime source information regarding the name "Columbiad" on and off for many years.  He is still looking, and I thought maybe the power of the internet could help him.

He wants to find the true origin of the name "Columbiad" as applied to large seacoast cannon, probably beginning with the "50 pounders" I see listed in early 19th C. inventories of the armament of various forts.

He's seen all of the secondary works that attribute the name to the Columbia foundry, and some other possible origins, but he's not buying any of those undocumented, anecdotal-type explanations.  He wants to get to the true origin, and wants to be able to document it. 

Any assistance you can give him will be greatly appreciated.

[Cat Whisperer]

If I remember correctly, one of the links in the REFERENCES sticky refers to a manufacturing company by that name. 

[GGaskill]

He wants to get to the true origin, and wants to be able to document it.

He isn't the first one who wants to do that.  So to find something more satisfying, he will have to look places that his predecessors haven't looked.  I wish him patience.

[Cat Whisperer]

Being able to document something like that is a game - called research.

If indeed 'ALL' the references have been looked at then the job is done; but 'all' is a very broad term.

It's obvious there may be no EASY answer, and the reference may well be obscure enough to never hit the internet. 

The answer may be in what local references (local to the foundry - in the community wherein it is).  There may be archives of newspapers and other references as professional journals that might just make a reference to a shipment or purchase made back in that time.

Perhaps not a red-hot likely source would be the Scientific American articles of the time.  There were quite a few in the 1850's and 1860's about the state of the art of cannon making.  Many libraries have these on microfilm.  (I did a paper on the history of small arms about 40 some years ago using a number of articles from there.)

The speed of doing the research seems incredibly slow now that we have so much at our fingertips with internet searches.

[Double D]

A five minute research of the Internet leads me to believe the naming of the big Seacoast Guns "Columbiad"s is going to come from the fanciful or perhaps the philosophical. The Meaning of the word Columbiad prior to the big guns was,  "any of certain epics recounting the European settlement and growth of the United States."  A study of contemprary literature, may reveal the answer

[cannonmn]

Scientific American was mentioned.  Those issued from the middle 19th C. are online and searchable here:

http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/browse.journals/scia.html

The name Columbiad appears in ordnance inventories pretty soon after 1800, so research in that timeframe is needed.  I have been contacted by a "D.E. Graves" from Canada who has done a lot of research and tried to find out the answer also, without success.  He's been through the Correspondence of the Secretary of War in the National Archives, which is known as "REcord Group 107" consisting of 66 reels of microfilm.  It ain't there, if he read every single document.  But maybe he didn't!

How 'bout someone go to the National Archives and read over those little 'ole microfilmed letters and find the applicable document.  Your primary reward will of course, be self-satisfaction, but you will also have my thanks, and those of my friend.

[Cat Whisperer]

Of note is doing two Google searches:

those spelling it Columbaid and
 also spelling it Columbiad .

Both will get results.

[Cat Whisperer]

There is a wealth of stuff out there -

One source credit's the design to George Bomford, West point graduate, CLASS OF 1805, After graduating from West Point, Bomford continued his army career in the Corps of Engineers, building seacoast fortifications. He also experimented with designs for heavy guns able to fire both explosive shells and solid shot.

JSTOR has some interesting things as well, as DD pointed out the term used to broadly define a class of heavy cannons, and the resulting ambiguities.

[cannonmn]

There are 11 posts so far re:  Columbiad, on another site:

http://n-ssa.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=8347