[ Columbus Armoury Carbine ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
with a particularly scarce pattern
of Confederate carbine.
Now this is a model marked "Columbus Armoury"
and we know who made it, it was a guy named John Gray.
But we don't know a whole lot about the circumstances of its manufacture.
But I think the story is fairly interesting, and the gun is just ridiculously rare.
So the gist of this is we should actually start with John Gray's brother, William Gray.
He and a partner named Eldridge Greenwood were entrepreneurs
in South Carolina before the Civil War.
When the war broke out they bought a sword factory,
they hired a very competent, skilled English gunsmith by the name of J.P. Murray,
and they set about making rifles and carbines for the Confederate government.
Now we have some documentation of these,
their guns are known and marked and fairly well understood.
What's more interesting is that John Gray, William Gray's brother, was in a similar situation.
He was also an entrepreneur, most of his work before the war had been in the railroad industry.
And he set up a manufacturing plant as well when the war broke out.
And it appears that he started making guns just on his own, figuring,
"I know we can sell these to someone. Let me just start making them,
and then I'll send around some letters and see if I can get some interest and sell them."
Well, he had the Confederate government as a potential client,
and he also had all the various Southern States as potential clients.
And it seems to have worked out.
So in 1862 he wrote to Colonel Gorgas who was in charge of Confederate Ordnance and said,
"Hey, I'm sitting down here in Columbus, I've got this factory.
I'm putting out 5 or 6 guns every day, but with the right sort of contract
I could be cranking out 500 or 600 a month, if you're interested.
Like I've already got this other contract going,
I've got a couple of hundred guns here already. Let's talk."
Well, it appears that he never actually got a second contract.
He had one contract definitely for the State of Alabama,
and that was for 200 rifles and 1,000 carbines.
And as best we can tell he never actually completed it.
... Based on correspondence, he was paid $45 per gun.
The total amount he received from Alabama was enough for 183 guns,
although the records show that he only delivered 176.
Clearly it wasn't the full 1,200 that he was contracted for.
And by 1863 he had basically changed his business model,
and he'd leased out some of his facilities, and was doing much more in the way of
general assorted useful goods. It looks like he got out of the gun business.
So let's take a look at this, let me show you how we can identify this,
and how we know that it is a Confederate carbine.
This is a Mississippi Pattern, single shot, [percussion] lock, muzzleloading rifle.
The rifling is three lands and grooves.
We've got a brass lock bar there.
Lock plate here, how do we know that this is Columbus Armoury?
Well, Mr Gray very helpfully stamped the lock plate "Columbus Armoury" right there.
It's a little faint, but definitely unmistakable.
Now, how do we know it's a Confederate gun?
Well, we have a very faint stamping here that seems a little bit enigmatic,
P-R-O right there, over F-C-H.
Again, ... it's a little hard to see, that's a very worn marking.
But that is a known and documented inspector's stamp.
So that's the mark of a Captain (later Major) Humphreys,
he was the commanding officer of the CSA Ordnance Department
and the Arsenal at Columbus, Georgia.
... The Columbus Armoury that is referenced on the lock plate here is a commercial endeavour,
the Columbus Arsenal was the official CSA arsenal in Columbus.
So we know that this was an official inspected and approved carbine
that went into Confederate military service.
There is one other mark on the gun, although ... it has absolutely no provenance,
and that is a W, S maybe, WJ? It's a little hard for me to tell here.
But it's lightly carved into the stock of the gun.
Someone's initials for sure, whether that was a Civil War soldier
who carried this weapon, or his grandson playing around with it,
or some guy 10 years ago, absolutely no way to know.
But initials like this are not unheard of in period Civil War arms, so it could be original.
Starting at the back, we have a brass butt plate.
Mechanically speaking we have a nice brass trigger guard here.
Sling swivel on the front of the trigger guard.
One brass barrel band, and then a two band nose cap
with the front sling swivel, ... ram rod, for this.
And a very small brass front sight.
That is coupled with an equally small and simple fixed rear sight.
So no adjustability, it kind of makes sense for a carbine like this,
it's going to be used really only at close range.
There may only be a few really hard facts that we know and a lot then of supposition,
but to me the story of the Columbus Armoury carbines really does a pretty good job
of encapsulating Confederate ordnance procurement in general.
There was never a tremendous amount of industrial base in the South, in the Confederacy.
They always had trouble procuring guns, and what they would come up with were
a bunch of entrepreneurs who were able to set up something and figured,
"How hard can it be to make guns? Like there's a ton of demand, we'll sell anything we can make."
And then in a story that's, well, ... not just relevant to the Confederacy,
but to gun manufacture throughout time and across the world,
it turns out guns are actually a lot harder to make than people think.
And problems come up. And especially in the Confederacy problems of manpower came up.
Your workers would be conscripted into the army.
Problems of raw materials supply came up, you had a hard time getting iron,
getting all of the other materials you needed to build guns.
And even once you had them, the quality was often sketchy.
Tooling was hard to come by, money was hard to come by.
Everything was set against the Confederacy in terms of developing small arms.
And as a result they get a lot of very small-scale production, things like this.
The guns are well-known, established technology.
These are ... simple percussion guns, rifles and muskets.
In the North you would see much more experimentation with cartridge-firing breech loaders.
In the South there are just a couple of those, but the vast majority was
simple guns that people are much more confident of being able to make,
that take less equipment, less cost, and less new technology.
So I believe there are a total of three of these marked Columbus that are well known.
The chances are some of the unmarked guns typically associated with J.P. Murray
are in fact John Gray Columbus Armoury guns,
but that's firmly in the realm of speculation at this point.
Regardless, we do know for a fact that the two were very similar.
So Gray, I'm sure, got quite a bit of help from his brother's outfit
in his initial attempts at producing guns before he just gave up on the whole enterprise.
Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.