Mortar Information

[GLS]

I like the look of this mortar (?) at Fort Sumpter and was wondering if anyone out there has any more information on it.  I cannot find any other than the sign.

[Cannoneer]

GLS,

You find some good stuff! The placque pretty much sums it up, except I don't know where they got the M 1819 info from.
The Registry lists this as a 10-inch seacoast mortar cast at Hughes Foundry circa 1807. Register # 4, weight in hundredweight 34-1-25, West Point Trophy # 314, located at Ft. Sumter, SC. There's a conjoined HF on top of the barrel.  Imperial Hundredweight is figured as the first digit/s = 112 lbs, the second digit/s = 28 lbs (quarter hundredweight), and the third digit/s = 1 lb. The weight of this gun is 34 x 112 + 1 x 28 + 25 X 1 = 3861 lbs.

[Artilleryman]

 Robinson Battery, Michigan Lt. Art. website lists the following information.

10-inch seacoast mortar, circa 1807.  Total length, 45.625-inches; weight, 3,860 pounds; total production, unknown quantity by Henry Foxall; known survivor, 1. The single known survivor at Fort Sumter may be that which fired the first shot of the Civil War.

http://robinsonsbattery.org/79215.html

[Cannoneer]

I saw the Robinson's Battery ID; Henry Foxall was the owner of Columbia Foundry located at Georgetown (D.C.). He established the foundry in 1801 and sold it in 1815.

[GLS]

Thanks for the the excellent information.  I wonder how and what it was mounted on.

[Max Caliber]

GLS,

In the book, The Image of War, Volume 1, Shadows of the Storm, pages 116, 117 and 416 are pictures of perhaps that very barrel along with another of the same pattern, mounted on fine looking, very well made wooden flask type beds with small front trucks (wheels). The pictures are of the Confederate Trapier Mortar Battery on Morris Island from which they bombarded Fort Sumter at the start of the Civil War. The book states that these pictures may be the most important confederate pictures on the entire war from a photographic standpoint and the fact that they may be the first pictures made of the war. These pictures were discovered in recent years and are probably copyrighted and not in the public domain. There is a drawing of one these pictures on page 63 of the book, Artillery and Ammunition of the Civil War, by Warren Ripley.

Information from the other posts indicates that the mortar in your pictures was excavated in 1959 at the fort and was also a trophy gun. It had to be one or the other, but not both, unless the Union Army was still capturing Confederate guns as late as 1959.

Max

[GLS]

Thanks again.  I see a future project developing.