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When did the practice of gauging leather in ounces begin? What does it mean--ounces per square foot? Most people I buy leather from today are woefully un-informed about the origins of the terms they use or what they mean. When it comes to leather thickness they refer to charts like this...(ATTACHED)...but how did the Ordnance and QM Departments gauge leather in the 1860s--did they convert ounces to inches as they seem to do today?
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Andy Masich -
Re: Gauging leather thickness c.1860
Here is an excerpt from an article David Jarnagin and myself wrote some time ago. He could answer this better than I (I am not as informed - so I will ask him to anwer this) but.....the conversion chart probably is intended to convert sides of leather to variable uses. Prior to and during the war leather was always sold by weight not size. This changed about 1885. Here are a couple of excerpts from some of our articles on 19th century leather.....
Military leather at the time of the CW was intended to be oak tanned however, ....”tanners routinely “cheated” and used hemlock tanning methods. Why? Hemlock bark had a higher percentage of tannin than Oak and it thus shortened the overall tanning process by a month or more. Another advantage was that Hemlock tanned hides tended to be heavier and therefore brought more money because leather was sold by the pound (until about 1885) rather than by square feet as it is today. Simply put, Hemlock tanned leather was quicker and more profitable to produce”
“It should also be noted that the leather available today in the United States is not bark tanned in the same manner as it was a century and a half ago. Today, leather is vegetable tanned, but using barks (mostly Quebracho from South America) and chemicals as well as chemical dyes that are completely different from the period. Tanning methods also took longer then than now. Even the cattle raised today for hides are bred and fed differently using accelerated feeds and generally slaughtered at an earlier age than cattle of the period. In summary, it is difficult at best for today’s leather and dyes to truly duplicate that produced during the Civil War period.”
Furthermore, tanning methods have changed so that modern tanner understands little of the “what”, “why” and “how” of the 19th century. It’s an entirely changed industry with little resemblance to its ancestors of one hundred years ago. Today’s tanning methods are so different that leather today tends to be less strong and often cut thicker to achieve the same strength that deeper tanned period leather did with less thickness. This is not a universal statement but a simple explanation.
For a nice overview of mid-19th century leather take a look at this article...(I have others on the web site written under David Jarnagin’s expertise that go into more about Confederate and British leather.)
I don’t know if I helped or not.
Ken R Knopp
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