I found this lead piece in an old trash dump in Mississippi. I thought it was a door stop since it was so heavy but then did a google image search that showed the same object was a civil war era lead ingot. My question is how to authenticate it ? Were reproductions ever made? I can’t imagine anyone would want a reproduction lead ingot I’m just trying to be sure.
Confederate Missouri lead ingot ?
- Thread starter Viola
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Great fine and welcome to Tnet.
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- Jun 8, 2006
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Good find but I think it is a later plumbers ingot?
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TheCannonballGuy
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Viola, the lead object's finder, said:
> Confederate Missouri lead ingot? I found this lead piece in an old trash dump in Mississippi.
The fact that you found it in a trash dump tells us more about it than you might think. If it was made by the Confederates, it would have gotten used, not thrown away. Trust my historical research about that. By the last year of the war, the Confederacy was so short of lead it had to turn to confiscating lead window-weights and lead pipes to make bullets. Especially in the "Western Theater" of the war, which got FAR less war-material support from both Washington and Richmond, lead was darn-near a precious metal.
> I thought it was a door stop since it was so heavy but then did a google image search that
> showed the same object was a civil war era lead ingot. My question is how to authenticate it?
Generally, a lead ingot, or any other non-iron ingot, is carefully manufactured to contain exactly a very precise weight of the metal. Examples: a 1-Troy Ounce silver bar, 1 kilogram copper ingot, or a 1-pound lead ingot. So, borrow a Postal Shipping scale (which measures weight very precisely, usually in tenths-of-an-ounce), and weigh your lead object. Since it appears to be completely unused, no lead is missing, its weight SHOULD fall "dead on" a full (not fractional) number. Examples: 1.0 pound, 2.20 pounds (1.0 kilogram), and so forth.
Another POSSIBLE (not guaranteed) authentication clue:
Button collectors in particular are aware of the importance of the "font" or lettering-style of writing on an object. In the 1860s, the great majority of markings on a METAL object were written in what is called "Serifed" lettering. The state name on your object is written in "plain block" lettering... a font which did not become widely used on metal objects until about 1890/1900. If you want an example, take a look at the lettering on US coins in the 1860s and the 1960s. You'll see that "plain block" lettering on US coins is rare until the 20th-Century. Examples: Compare the lettering-style of the Seated Liberty (1837-1891) dimes and Barber (1892-1916) dimes' words "United States Of America" and "One Dime" (serifed) with the same words on a Mercury (1916-1945 dime (plain-block).
So, the fact that "Missouri" on your object is written in plain-block lettering strongly suggests (but is not 100% proof) that the object was manufactured at least several decades after the end of the civil war, if not in the 20th-Century.
Lastly:
I've learned in my decades of closely examining excavated civil war relics that it is often possible to accurately guess the correct identity of a metal by the distinctive characteristics of the oxide/patina/corrosion on the metal's surface. Example: The visible difference in the color and texture of the lead patina on a civil war Minie-bullet and a civil war Burnside Carbine bullet. The Burnside bullet is NEVER found with the beautiful milk-white patina we commonly see on dug 3-groove Minies. The difference is caused by the Minie-bullet being made of 100%-pure lead. Burnside bullets were made of "a hardened-lead alloy." In this case, "hardened" meant the manufacturer increased the hardness of the lead by adding another metal (such as Zinc or Antimony") into the molten lead during the casting process. The reason for "hardening" the lead is that REPEATING rifles were able to fire many more bullets in one minute than a single-shot muzzleloader rifle. Firing soft lead bullets inevitably caused what was called "leading of the bore." With each shot, the gunbarrel's rifling-grooves shave/wear off a small amount of soft lead bullets, which can build up so badly you can't even get a bullet to fit into the gunbarrel. For slow-firing guns the bore-leading happened quite slowly, but with rapid-firing guns the buildup happened exponentially faster. So, gun manufactures had to specify that only hardened-lead bullets be used in their repeaters.
All of that being said:
Note that the patina on your lead object is clearly NOT the nice smooth milk-white of pure lead. The patina says it is made of hardened-lead... or perhaps Solder, which is a very similar lead-alloy. The Confederates made very-very few bullets with hardened-lead, because they possessed very-very few repeating rifles.
Truly final comment:
You cannot trust what Google images says your object is. (Especially if the word "Confederate" shows up.) Ebay is full of thousands of photos of fake or incorrectly identified "civil war relics." And thousands more fake/misidentified new photos will show up next week... and the week after, ad infinitum.
Hopefully this information is helpful to you.
> Confederate Missouri lead ingot? I found this lead piece in an old trash dump in Mississippi.
The fact that you found it in a trash dump tells us more about it than you might think. If it was made by the Confederates, it would have gotten used, not thrown away. Trust my historical research about that. By the last year of the war, the Confederacy was so short of lead it had to turn to confiscating lead window-weights and lead pipes to make bullets. Especially in the "Western Theater" of the war, which got FAR less war-material support from both Washington and Richmond, lead was darn-near a precious metal.
> I thought it was a door stop since it was so heavy but then did a google image search that
> showed the same object was a civil war era lead ingot. My question is how to authenticate it?
Generally, a lead ingot, or any other non-iron ingot, is carefully manufactured to contain exactly a very precise weight of the metal. Examples: a 1-Troy Ounce silver bar, 1 kilogram copper ingot, or a 1-pound lead ingot. So, borrow a Postal Shipping scale (which measures weight very precisely, usually in tenths-of-an-ounce), and weigh your lead object. Since it appears to be completely unused, no lead is missing, its weight SHOULD fall "dead on" a full (not fractional) number. Examples: 1.0 pound, 2.20 pounds (1.0 kilogram), and so forth.
Another POSSIBLE (not guaranteed) authentication clue:
Button collectors in particular are aware of the importance of the "font" or lettering-style of writing on an object. In the 1860s, the great majority of markings on a METAL object were written in what is called "Serifed" lettering. The state name on your object is written in "plain block" lettering... a font which did not become widely used on metal objects until about 1890/1900. If you want an example, take a look at the lettering on US coins in the 1860s and the 1960s. You'll see that "plain block" lettering on US coins is rare until the 20th-Century. Examples: Compare the lettering-style of the Seated Liberty (1837-1891) dimes and Barber (1892-1916) dimes' words "United States Of America" and "One Dime" (serifed) with the same words on a Mercury (1916-1945 dime (plain-block).
So, the fact that "Missouri" on your object is written in plain-block lettering strongly suggests (but is not 100% proof) that the object was manufactured at least several decades after the end of the civil war, if not in the 20th-Century.
Lastly:
I've learned in my decades of closely examining excavated civil war relics that it is often possible to accurately guess the correct identity of a metal by the distinctive characteristics of the oxide/patina/corrosion on the metal's surface. Example: The visible difference in the color and texture of the lead patina on a civil war Minie-bullet and a civil war Burnside Carbine bullet. The Burnside bullet is NEVER found with the beautiful milk-white patina we commonly see on dug 3-groove Minies. The difference is caused by the Minie-bullet being made of 100%-pure lead. Burnside bullets were made of "a hardened-lead alloy." In this case, "hardened" meant the manufacturer increased the hardness of the lead by adding another metal (such as Zinc or Antimony") into the molten lead during the casting process. The reason for "hardening" the lead is that REPEATING rifles were able to fire many more bullets in one minute than a single-shot muzzleloader rifle. Firing soft lead bullets inevitably caused what was called "leading of the bore." With each shot, the gunbarrel's rifling-grooves shave/wear off a small amount of soft lead bullets, which can build up so badly you can't even get a bullet to fit into the gunbarrel. For slow-firing guns the bore-leading happened quite slowly, but with rapid-firing guns the buildup happened exponentially faster. So, gun manufactures had to specify that only hardened-lead bullets be used in their repeaters.
All of that being said:
Note that the patina on your lead object is clearly NOT the nice smooth milk-white of pure lead. The patina says it is made of hardened-lead... or perhaps Solder, which is a very similar lead-alloy. The Confederates made very-very few bullets with hardened-lead, because they possessed very-very few repeating rifles.
Truly final comment:
You cannot trust what Google images says your object is. (Especially if the word "Confederate" shows up.) Ebay is full of thousands of photos of fake or incorrectly identified "civil war relics." And thousands more fake/misidentified new photos will show up next week... and the week after, ad infinitum.
Hopefully this information is helpful to you.
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Thank you for the informative reply. I had my doubts about it being civil war era anything as I wasn’t really looking for anything other than old bottles when I found it. I am running low on good strong paperweights so I think I’ll keep it anyway. It isn’t fully intact though, it seems someon punched a hole in the tab protruding out from the ingot. Someone told me it may be some kind of lead that was used in early printers. My money is on plumbers solder or maybe even a souvenir door stop from back in the day. lol.
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