Is it always true that Committee of Safety muskets were patched together from preexisting parts?
Always and Never are tough words to live up to. :wink:
Spence, it's going to depend on the colony and the contractor..., and then as mentioned you are going to find the
label of a CoS Musket applied to any jumbled together piece in many cases.
Plus you have provenance problems.
Starting with the latter..., So Private Parts serving in a local militia unit gets an old LLP musket, sent back to the colony when that colony's regiments get issued French arms. He keeps it after using it in the war, but the barrel has a problem, so he gets the local gunsmith to fit a used barrel. It's a Dutch or French barrel, and centuries later, after it was lovingly preserved by the descendants of Private Parts, it's brought out for auction. Only now the appraiser declares the musket to be a rare CoS musket, when in fact it was cobbled,
after the war. :shocked2:
As for a true CoS musket, well each colony would have different situations, and some more than one. Using Maryland as an example (as I can get into some local records), in 1768 in Annapolis an inventory showed:
Above the conference chamber...,
86 carbines and short muskets;
57 old muskets, and carbines;
104 ditto, mostly without locks, and not worth repairing;
And also...,
Under the conference chamber...,
382 muskets, very rusty, and many of the locks want repairing;
6o ditto mostly without locks;
35 musket barrels;
So seven years before the war there are 104 muskets too worn out to be repaired, plus 382 in bad shape, and in another portion of the storage area an additional 60 muskets, mostly without locks, and finally 35 musket barrels. There are other muskets that are in good shape, but I have omitted mention of them as one would not cannibalize a serviceable gun..., I hope....
So how many of these were scrapped, and the hardware, plus any repairable locks and usable barrels became muskets for the AWI?
By 1776 we find musket barrels, alone, being issued to an officer:
A Bill of Armes sent to the Council of Safety at Annapolis by Capt Norris Nov. 20th 1776.
To 50 Musket Bbls.
Is the good captain building guns, or repairing existing guns???
Add to that there are documents that the gunshop at Jerusalem Mill Village [as one example] was contracted to make complete muskets, so you have them either making them from scratch, perhaps after barrels were delivered, or perhaps assembling them from existing parts in a simple, restocking operation.
Then throw into the mix, if one is going to start producing muskets, one might be producing
new parts, which are sand cast copies of old parts, so a 1748 LLP sideplate could be used to make side plates for "new" muskets, in 1776...and how can one tell??
LD