Could this be a lead casting bar?

[Renaebri]

Hi it's been a while! Its too hot to hunt lately so I got curious about this older find...


It says New York City, but looks like theres a Co. before that. Found in Florida, in a town settled by veterans but no battles were here, there was a sugar mill very close to where it was found.

I found something very similar online, but says something different.

 

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[SteveS]

Interesting. Now doing my part with social distancing, so I have time on my hands for cleaning & sorting some shipwreck artifacts from years ago. Cleaned the encrustation off one of the lead bars similar to those in this post, from a shipwreck off Highland Beach, Fl found years ago. After cleaning, it reads "James McCullough N.Y." I see others have posted the history of this company here, so this now dates the wreck from between 1855? to 1875. Appeared wreck was carrying building supplies, as had barrels of nails and lots of slate. Been buried under sand for last 30 years. One photo shows these bars have the vertical lines others mention in this post.

Some said they found these type bars on the beach, as we found these on a wreck not far off the beach, maybe from a wreck.

So used for soldering, casting musket balls in the field, or likely both? Now have a better idea of the wreck's time frame. Maybe it was lost lost during the Civil War bringing supplies. I see McCullough's Shot & Lead Co. supplied ammo for the Union.

 

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[Charlie P. (NY)]

I don't believe it was practice to cast balls or bullets "in the field" during the Civil War. A Minnie ball mold is three parts plus handles and you could carry 25 bullets instead of the mold for that weight; not counting the lead and ladle.

 

[DCMatt]

I remember this thread...

Not sure how I missed this bit in my research:

[h=3]Artifact Description[/h]The ten lead ingots recovered from a single cluster from the Jacksonville "Blue China" wreck are best interpreted as domestic assemblage, because one example, BC-05-00030-LD, is sliced off at its left end and possibly burnt at the right end, suggesting shipboard use. All of the ingots are bent and some display curved horizontal sides. As well as being uniform in shape, the dimensions are relatively consistent. On average, the ingots measure 27.0-28.1cm long and are 1.9-2.1cm wide maximum.

Each ingot bears on its upper horizontal surface the mold-impressed name of ‘James McCullough. N-Y’. James McCullough was the President of McCullough’s Shot and Lead Company, which in 1856 was located at 159 Front Street in New York City. An advertisement in the New York Times of 25 October 1856 confirms that McCullough was selling miscellaneous lead products, including bar lead (Wilson, 1857: 518). The company is most renowned as a major supplier to the Ordnance Department of the Union Army during the American Civil War. Multiple orders of buckshot, elongated balls and round balls of lead were requested by Major Thornton and Captain Crispin of the Ordnance Department between 1861 and 1864. Demand declined after the Civil War and in 1875 McCullough’s Lead Company went bankrupt.

 

[TheCannonballGuy]

Charlie_P wrote:
> I don't believe it was practice to cast balls or bullets "in the field" during the Civil War.

Charlie, the following is intended just as friendly educational info. Both the CS and US armies provided their soldiers a continual supply ammunition for the firearms which the army issued to the soldiers. But if a soldier (or small unit) was carrying "non-issued" firearms, you had to cast your own bullets for your firearm. This seems to particularly be the case with pistols. We civil war relic-diggers very rarely find evidence of casting rifle-caliber Minie bullets "in the field." But finds of field-cast pistol bullets, and the bulletmolds for them, are not uncommon. At least twice I myself have dug "miscast & discarded" pistol bullets in Confederate camps.

The photos below (which aren't mine) shows some remnants of field-casting of civil war pistol bullets. Notice the "short pour" discards, and cut-off casting sprues.

 

[Bigcypresshunter]

So used for soldering, casting musket balls in the field, or likely both? Now have a better idea of the wreck's time frame. Maybe it was lost lost during the Civil War bringing supplies. I see McCullough's Shot & Lead Co. supplied ammo for the Union.

The bendable lead strips with the vertical lines seem to match to duck decoy ballast weights.

Some McCullough lettering has serifs and some doesn't. The serif lettering like yours is older. Do yours have a hole in each end?