Artifact - Civil War era saddletree inspection stencil

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Todd
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Last Name: Holmes

In the never-ceasing attempt to improve and control the quality of saddletrees being produced during the civil war, the War Department issued directives via "Ordnance Circulars". These circulars contain a variety of Ordnance-related notes on policy changes and updates, newly approved inspection practices, and notes for the wide variety of Ordnance officers and agents in the field for how to conduct their operations.

In regards to horse equipments and saddletrees in particular, some of these Circulars show a trend where the Ordnance Dept is in a running battle with all their contractors in an attempt to maintain and improve standards of quality. While some were excellent, and indeed proactive in suggesting and championing improvements ( Demorest comes to mind ) - others... not so much.

Having handled a variety of original saddletrees, I've come to the conclusion that it took this amount of effort to finally manage to obtain a fairly consistent product by 1864. Even with that consistency in form, it is still interesting to see the degree of differences in saddletrees. They are a fascinating study in hand-made mass-produced items.

Here is a small snippet of a change in saddletree inspection, from Circular 12 of 1864 series, dated April 6, 1864. It has a minor change from previous circular regarding the type of inspection mark to be used by the sub-inspector, and the addition of a manufacturers brass id tag. It is illustrative of the level of concern the Ordnance Department had with holding all parties as accountable as possible for the quality of their product:
"2d. The trees - A sworn sub-inspector must be kept on duty at the factory where the trees are made, who will be instructed to watch the progress of trees in all stages of their manufacture; and no tree is to be permitted to be made up by a contractor which has not name and title of the sub-inspector stamped on the seat in black. Measures will be immediately taken to see that each sub-inspector is furnished with a suitable stamp. The sub-inspector will be furnished with an extract from that part of the contract relating to the material to be used and the manner in which the work is put together, and he will see that these directions are closely adhered to...... No tree is to be stamped with the inspector's name until it has had the maker's name and residence, stamped on a brass plate, affixed to it in the manner prescribed by previous instructions from this office."
I don't believe that all saddletree makers managed to incorporate the brass id tag - I've only seen two contractor names on these types of tags; Demorest, and Prudden (see below).
prudden_tag.jpg
prudden_tag.jpg (31.1 KiB) Viewed 1592 times
Following is an example of a slightly earlier inspectors 'stencil' marking, which was large and bold, place on both the cantle face of the tree, and on the rawhide cover in about the same position. Research may yet ID the sub-inspector, and thereby ID the maker of the particular tree. This is a cleaned up version, showing the font and size - this appeared to be a heavy printers-type ink, applied with a stencil.
mcc1864inspmark.gif
mcc1864inspmark.gif (10.73 KiB) Viewed 1595 times
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