belt buckle & breastplate

[ZanyAmy]

Hello, first time here and I need help with identification. I have a US brass buckle & a brass/lead eagle breastplate. These came from an estate of a prominant family that had run a local newspaper for decades. Unfortunetly, the family members that were present did not have any information to give me. How can I tell if these 2 items are real or fakes. How if real do you date them?

 

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[vpnavy]

How did you get them ZanyAmy. Did you dig them out of the ground? Did the family member's pull them out of a box?

 

[gunsil]

Hi Amy, they are real, and they are civil war era. I suppose the main way to know is to handle a lot of originals and look closely at fakes. I have owned fifty or so of the original buckles and a bunch of the breastplates and handled many more. The style of the letters on your breastplate is proper for the time period. They are very nice pieces.

 

[TheCannonballGuy]

I agree with Gunsil, both are genuinely from the civil war era.

More info:
The breastplate is marked with the manufacturer's name, H.A. Dingee. He made them from 1852 to 1863. IMPORTANT NOTE: some with a fake H.A. Dingee marking do exist, but the exact shape of the lettering in your plate's marking proves it is the genuine version.

As you may already know, tens-of-thousands of reproduction Oval-US belt-buckles have been made in the 20th-Century for battle re-enactors. Fortunately for use collectors, there are subtle "manufacturing clues" which enable us to distinguish a Reproduction from a genuine Original specimen. I will not list those clues here in their entirety, lest fakers learn how to "fix" them. But the clues I see on your buckle Oval-US buckle prove that it was manufactured between 1862 and 1865.

 

[HutSiteDigger]

That breast-plate is more rarer than your average eagle breast plate you normally see.. Pretty plate.