Here are two of the minie balls that I found last weekend. The site is now a hay field but was evidently used as a camp during the civil war. There were no battles or skirmishes there. It has been metal detected for years but I wanted to try the Safari there and it was just mowed so the conditions were good. The bullet on the left is a .69 caliber and the one on the right is a .58 caliber, as I understand it. You can see that the larger minie ball is just about the same diameter as a dime and that is just about the diameter of a 12 gauge slug. Scary to think about being on the worng end of slugs like that. The smaller bullet has been stuck in the barrel. Maybe a misfire or wet powder. They had a tool with a screw on the end of it that they could screw into the soft lead and pull it out of the barrel. I have heard of these bullets but had never found one before. You can clearly see the threads in the tip of the bullet after I cleaned it up. I am guessing that they first put a blunt tool down the barrel to make a flat spot on the tip of the bullet and then put the screw tip in. The minie balls in this field are usually 6 to 9 inches deep. The smaller bullets registered 32-33 and the larger bullets ran 34-35.
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Civil war era minie balls
- Thread starter Brookie
- Start date
