Robert Finch Camp #14

Rodman 8” Gun
Veterans Memorial Park
Boyne City, Michigan

Boyne City Cannon

This gun was moved, sand blasted, painted & turned right side up when the Veterans Memorial Park was upgraded circa 2009. The plaque in front of the gun reads as follows.

RODMAN 8-INCH GUN
Muzzle reads: “42 S.C.L. S. McM & Co 1865
8465 lbs.”
Foundry number on right rim base reads: “3A6”

Parent company is Reading Iron Works,
Reading, PA – Scott Foundry,
Owner: Seyfer McManus & Co.

These guns were used in coastal fortifications
From 1861 to 1871.

Model No.:                  1861 8-inch Gun
                                    (40 known survivors)
Weight:                        8,465 lbs.
Charge:                       10 lbs.
Shot:                            65 lbs.
Shell:                           50 lbs.
Shell Range:                3,873 Yards (202 Miles) @
                                    30 degrees Elevation
Crew Required:           8 Men to Load and Fire
Year Made:                 1865
Elevation Mechanism: Pre-2/21/1861 had
Ratchets, later had sockets.

A little about the Rodman Guns (Columbiads)

Guns had been traditionally cast solid and the bore was bored out of the solid metal. With this traditional method, the guns cooled from the outside inward. Castings shrink as they cool. As each succeeding layer cooled it contracted, pulling away from the still molten metal in the center, creating voids and tension cracks. Drilling out the bore removed the voids, but the tensions in the metal were still toward the outside. Rodman devised a method of casting where the gun cooled from the inside out, so that as cooling occurred, it created compression rather than tension. This resulted in a much stronger gun.
Columbiads were not the only guns cast using Rodman’s method. Dalgren XV-inch shell guns for the U.S. Navy were also hollow cast using the Rodman method. –from Wikipedia

Inspection date; 9/10/2012
G. R. Grieve

Memorials Officer

PURPOSE of the SUVCW

To perpetuate the memory of the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.) and the men who saved the Union between 1861-1865; to assist in every practicable way in the preservation and making available for research of documents and records pertaining to the G.A.R. and its members; to cooperate in doing honor to all who have patriotically served our country in any war; to teach patriotism, and the duties of citizenship, the true history of our country, and the love and honor of our Flag; to oppose every tendency or movement that would weaken loyalty to, or make for the destruction or impairment of our constitutional Union; and to inculcate and broadly sustain the American principles of representative government, of equal rights, and of impartial justice for all