"ACW Cannon Carriages / Limbers" Topic

Hi All,

Anyone know if cannon carriages were painted buy either side?

What colours do you use for them?

I use kind of an olive drab green for mine.

Artillery Olive.

I use an olive shade for my Union carriages. Confederates may have used anything including Union captured guns which would be olive of some shade.

That's a similar colour to Napoleonic French Arty?

I thought French carriages were dark blue. It has been too many years since I played Naps to say. Any olive greenish/drabish color should be okay.

There is a nic 12 pounder on display in the Gettysburg visitor center, on the lower leve. It is an olive green type color.
If you visit the EVENTS page at my site go to the Rildey Creek reenactment event. I have photos of a Union cannon and limber in the same color. My site is at:
VictoriousColors.com

French carriages were olive green.

The US doctrine was based upon the French;

If you read the artillerists manuals of the time; amongst the equipment list for a battery was many gallons of Olive paint AND black paint [for the metal fittings] [It was a lot; and about 1/10 was black vs olive].

What I don't know is how fast the paint either peeled/flaked off or faded and if the latter to what….while on campaign. The manuals also discuss preferred wood types for carriage construction.

I've seen a lot of gamers paint their carriages natural wood; and for the CSA, various shades of gray. I have never read anything autoritatively that there was an official CSA carriage/limber color, there may have been but I've never read it. Both sides used the same manuals at the start of the war, though I would suspect the CSA would eventually get around to producing their own official manuals.

For me, you can't wrong with olive green; especially since the north had a nasty habit of supplying the CSA with materiel through the war. I think the depot at Harpers Ferry was the equivalent 1860s Quickee Mart for the Rebs……….

Union: Olive (naval guns grey or red)
CSA: majority Olive, some dirty yellow, some dark red, some grey.

note that olives may vary in tint a bit between batteries (more or less grey mixed in)(different paint supply?) As far as I have seen, natural wood would have been very rare. Gunners were known for their affection for their pieces. They made sure their "ladies" looked good as a gentleman don't let their daughter or wife run nude or in rags in the streets. The confederate variety seems to reflect the shortage of consistent supplies of single colors (unless it is free yankee olive pieces) as well as the free spirit, gaudy, militia backgrounds of many units. My guess, by the attitudes of gunners, they didn't let the wood have chipped paint if they could help it (as let the brass tarnish at all). Every battery on either side always had extra men to look after such repairs (as well as a travelling forge and carpentry tools to make new parts).