🔎 UNIDENTIFIED Am I right calling this a lead filled belt buckle?

VTSwinger

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May 5, 2017
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Northern VT
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Metal Detecting
Pretty sure this is the lead filled part of a belt buckle but I couldn't find any examples of round ones... Possibly a rosette that had a strap going through it? It is very heavy and am I right to assume that the front being tarnished the wat it is there was some sort of "face plate" attached to this at one point? Anyone who knows a thing or two care to bring me up to speed?
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I'm not sure how many women would want to wear a "bridal" rosette on that special day.

On the other hand, some of them might enjoy occasionally wearing a horse's bridle rosette, like the one you found.

Look at the top left item on this scanned page from the 1907 edition of the Saddlery mail-order catalog of the JM Eilers Company.

You asked if it had a "face plate." No, it was blank faced, like the one in the Eilers Co. catalog.

That being said... the filler-metal in yours is actually solder, not (pure) lead. Many civil war relic-diggers call your find a "lead-filled" rosette (or buckle or plate), but the nickname "lead-filled" is factually incorrect. Solder was used because pure lead doesn't want to stick to the buckle/plate/rosette's sheetbrass front... but solder adheres to brass very well.

Lastly... solder-filled buckles, plates, and rosettes fell out of favor a decade or two after the civil war ended. So your find is older than the solid-cast-brass version in the 1907 Eilers Catalog.
 

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I'm not sure how many women would want to wear a "bridal" rosette on that special day.

On the other hand, some of them might enjoy occasionally wearing a horse's bridle rosette, like the one you found.

Look at the top left item on this scanned page from the 1907 edition of the Saddlery mail-order catalog of the JM Eilers Company.

You asked if it had a "face plate." No, it was blank faced, like the one in the Eilers Co. catalog.

That being said... the filler-metal in yours is actually solder, not (pure) lead. Many civil war relic-diggers call your find a "lead-filled" rosette (or buckle or plate), but the nickname "lead-filled" is factually incorrect. Solder was used because pure lead doesn't want to stick to the buckle/plate/rosette's sheetbrass front... but solder adheres to brass very well.

Lastly... solder-filled buckles, plates, and rosettes fell out of favor a decade or two after the civil war ended. So your find is older than the solid-cast-brass version in the 1907 Eilers Catalog.
Thanks for all the info and grammatical laughs.
 

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