Gettysburg Shell Fragments??

[the_great_waldo]

I have permission to hunt a piece of property on the Confederate side of Willoughby Run on the first day's battlefield.

I found recently found these fragments all within perhaps a 20ft X 20ft area.

One appears to be a part of a fuse plug blown out by the shell explosion.

One an iron canister ball?

The other shell fragments I don't know.

If I draw a circle with the more rounded piece it comes out to be about 3".

Based on the location of the property it would possibly have been shelled by Union 3" ordnance rifles.

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

Family Maps of Hinds County, Mississippi, Deluxe Edition - Grab it through Amazon!

[duggap]

Welcome to the forum. Looks like part of a shell to me. Get back out there. I smell a good button waiting for you.

 

[TheCannonballGuy]

Civil war artillery projectiles (and fragments of them), and their fuzes have been my specialty-interest area of relics for 40 years. That being said, the only one of your finds I'm 100% certain about is the fuze piece, because there's several "likely" possibilities for the ID of the fragments and the small iron ball.

The identification problem comes from the fact that the artillery of both the US and CS armies at Gettysburg was firing literally all over the place... we often find a mixture of US and CS shell fragments at the same spot on the Gettysburg battlefield.

The fuze piece is from a US Bormann timefuze. By the time of the Gettysburg battle (July 1863), that type of fuze was only being used in cannonballs... so yours wasn't fired from a Rifled cannon (such as a 3"-caliber Ordnance Rifle).

Your iron ball, whose diameter appears to be less than .7-inch if the rust-crust on it is removed, could be either a Rifled-cannon's canister-ammo ball or a Case-Shot ball from an exploded CS or US antipersonnel shell.

One of your three artillery shell fragments shows a thin flat-bottomed edge, which tapers wider on the inner side of the frag. That looks like a piece of the lower side of a Confederate Read shell... although there is a lower possibility that it is from a US 2.9" Read-Parrott shell.

About your other two shell fragments:
All I can tell you is that they are from Rifled-cannon shells... there are too many varieties of "smooth-sided" shells (such as Read, Read-Parrott, Dyer, and Schenkl) to be certain about which type those two frags are from. If you find more of them, post them here in the What Is It? forum and I'll try to ID them for you. Looks like you're on what will be a very productive spot.

 

[the_great_waldo]

Thank you very much for your help!! I truly appreciate it. I knew you would probably be able to help. You had helped me figure out that my one find was a fragment from a Confederate 12 lb case shot (still had the fuze plug in it). As I find more from that spot I will post and let's see what we can figure out!

 

[littleneckhalfshell]

would be nice if you found a cannon to go with all those shell fragments ;-)

 

[CSA2K]

Nice haul and congrats on the permish man! Need a wing man message me!