TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

Category: Arms & Armament

  • Short Takes

    While discussing the rivers going into Mobile Bay with Dan O’Connell I came across a really nice map of the Gulf coast in 1861, covering the area from the Louisiana delta to Pensacola. And…you can zoom in! Just the thing for following Dan’s campaign posts. Fold3 looks at The Curious Case of Adelia who, it […]

  • Moore’s Patent Revolver

    UPDATE: Welcome to all of the readers at SayUncle!  For informaton on Civil War and other arms and armament, check out some other posts in our Arms and Armament category. I seem to be on a roll with CW-period revolvers. Came across another one the other day, the Moore’s Patent Revolver. The gun’s owner, who […]

  • Pocket Pistols Then & Now II

    In the last post we looked at an early cartridge pocket revolver, the Otis Smith, and compared it to a modern Kel-Tec pocket pistol. Today let’s take a jump a bit farther back to the 1840s, when Colt’s cap and ball revolvers were just coming into wide use. Much has been written about how Colt’s […]

  • Pocket Pistols Then & Now

    How far have pocket pistols come in 150 years? Let’s take a quick look. The Otis Smith revolver, which I posted about earlier, is a good example of the breed in the 1860s and 70s. It’s a knock-off of the Smith & Wesson Model 1½ introduced near the end of the Civil War. Smith introduced […]

  • Short Takes

    The Indiana University Press is having a 50% off spring sale coming up March 20-22. All regularly priced items are half off, free shipping on orders of $30 or more in the US. Use the code SAVE50 at checkout. Karen Thatcher of Martinsburg, WV, recently identified a photo of a Civil War relative. “That’s Uncle […]

  • Otis Smith Revolvers

    The mystery of the revolver I posted about a couple of days ago has been solved! It was made by Otis A. Smith of Rockfall, CT, presumably sometime in the 1870s to 1880s. I took the gun down to the local range (On Target here in Asheville) and Jeff, the owner, quickly tracked it down […]

  • Identifying an Old Gun

    I have recently come into possession of an old revolver and need some help identifying it. It looks very much like the S&W Model 1½ revolver that was introduced just after the Civil War, but has some significant differences, namely that it does not have the S&W “tip-up” barrel for reloading. Instead, you pull on […]