✅ SOLVED ID two mini balls

[DrJones]

Hey folks, dug these the other day (first ones), looking for some help in IDing them and are they civil war era, my guess is that they are pretty old based on the depth but the ground does funny things sometimes.

The one on the bottom is roughly
25.30 mm tall
14.68 mm wide
32 grams

The top one
24.25 mm tall
14.70 mm wide
29 grams
There inside bottoms were conical and smooth with no identifying marks

 

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[Spats]

Top one looks like a standard fired 3 ring .58 caliber Civil War era minie and the bottom one appears to be a dropped minie of the same caliber. The caliber is measured in inches rather than mm. Congrats on your first minies. Hope you find minie minie more.

 

[DrJones]

After switching the micrometer to inches .58 makes sense now . Since the base is conical with no star, is it safe to say then that it's a .58 Williams Regulation round? What type of gun would that have been fired from and I'm guessing it was US?

 

[TheCannonballGuy]

Brand-new TreasureNet member DrJones asked:
> Since the base is conical with no star, is it safe to say then that it's a .58 Williams Regulation round?

>What type of gun would that have been fired from and I'm guessing it was US?​

First... welcome to T-Net's "What Is It?" forum... the best place on the internet to get unknown objects CORRECTLY identified.

Second... it's always helpful to tell this forum's hardworking unpaid volunteer ID-helpers where the unidentified object was found. Please do that... and also, add your location to your member-profile info.

Now, onward to the questions you asked:
(1) No, neither of your two .58-cailber Minie-bullets is a US Williams Regulation minie. That type had very clearly visible "flat-bottomed" body grooves. See the photo below.

Both of your .58-caliber Minie bullets measure approximately .570-inch in diameter. Thus they could be used in either a US .58 Springfield or imported British .577 Enfield Rifle. (Just like the Confederates, the yankees imported many thousands of Enfields from Britain in 1861 and 1862... which were issued mostly to the "Western Theater" yankee armies, such as Grant's in the Vicksburg Campaign.)

One of your .58 Minies is what we civil war bullet collectors call an "offset cast" bullet. That means, the two halves of the bullet casting-mold were somewhat misaligned. Most folks assume that such crude casting means it was Confederate-made... but I personally dug hundreds of offset-cast 3-groove .58 Minies like yours in strictly-yankee sites in the Atlanta Campaign.

 

[DrJones]

They were found in the woods on Johns Island, SC near the Stono River just north of what was Lagareville during the Civil War. I knew from being a part time lurker this was the best place to come and ask.
Thanks guys for all the time, knowledge and help you put in.