What would be the proper paper or brass shells from this period? How were they packaged?
What would the boxes look like? Where could I find info on this period for loading tools?
Thanks, Chris
Go to eBay and find Abby Books/Corrnell Publications or check out her website: abbybooks@comcast.net
Abby has reprinted about 1,000 old guns and ammo catalogs. A wealth of info. The Parker Bros catalogs of the 1880s pictured a whole line of loading equipment.
By the late 1880s, paper shells dominated. Unloaded "shells" were in boxes of 100; loaded "cartridges" were in boxes of 25 because of weight. I believe the first factory loads were marketed in about 1885; before then, home-business loaders like Peters and Von Lengerke bought empty shells and sold loaded ammo locally. Keep in mind that rail rates were weight sensitive and a box of 100 loaded shotshells at 1 1/2 oz would have an incremental 10-plus lbs of lead, wads, and powder.
By the way, ten-bores started going out of fashion in the late 1880s, and by 1900 comprised only 2% of Parker Bros production, thus 10-bore collector ammo starts to diminish in proportion to other bore sizes after 1890. But it's not rare.
Destry is right about my new book. So much has been written about old shotshells and boxes that I limited my chapters on the topic to the seminal ammo of the 1860s and early 1870s, where the info is all but nonexistent. There was a "chicken and egg," which came first? situation with the post-Civil War American-made breechloaders. Of necessity, the makers had to literally invent their own ammo, which quickly went out of production when the early guns failed for bad design or financial reasons, like the Panic of 1873.
Action configuration and chambering standardized in about 1873 along the lines of the "tipping-open" Parker, which was the only surviving 1860s maker of commercial quantities of central fire breech-loading shotguns. The first year UMC made a paper shell was, coincidentally, 1873, and paper shells from then are headstamped "Parker Bro's Meriden Conn." UMC also made the "Parker's Patent" Berdan-primed brass shells with Parker's headstamp, and green-labeled shell boxes exist in collections with Parker's label pasted over UMC's.
However, almost every brass shotshell owned by collectors post-dates about 1877, when the tooling was designed to extrude a one-piece shell with a thick base to withstand the hammer smacking the Berdan primer against the built-in nipple, while as part of the same process making the extruded tube walls thicker at the base and thinner at the mouth to seal the chamber. These post-1877 shells all have an inner ring on the base; the only example of what I believe is pre-1877 technology (extruded and "bumped" like rimfires, or assembled and soldered multi-piece), being a Parker 11B-size shell without the extruded inner ring, which is shown on page 544 (right) of
The Parker Story. EDM
