Original Artifacts

 Clothing            Small Arms            Equipment          Personal Items

 Original artifacts for study and discussion.  Please only post original Civil War era items in this section.

Owing to the long period these items were used, repaired, remade, etc. caution should be exercised in assuming any item is a Civil War period naval item.  The U.S. Navy tended to recycle its gear far more than the U.S. Army did.  The Navy did not necessarily surplus off items just because a new pattern item might have been introduced.  The friction belt buckle, for example, is documented to have been issued during the Civil War with a blackened buff leather belt as specified by several wartime and immediate postwar ordnance manuals.  Finding such a belt made from harness leather does not prove or disprove its Civil War era manufacture but is more *likely* to be a post war replacement belt (from local sources) for a Civil War era buckle.  Civil War manufactured cutlasses were still to found aboard ship into World War Two albeit many had  replacement scabbards, frogs, belts, etc.