US Navy 32-Pounder of 42 Hundredweight Number 230 of USS Cairo

Sep 8

US Navy 32-Pounder of 42 Hundredweight Number 230 aboard USS Cairo at Vicksburg

A US Navy 32-Pounder of 42 Hundredweight, Number 230, is displayed aboard USS Cairo at Vicksburg National Military Park. This cannon was cast in 1845 at the Fort Pitt Foundry. It is marked as weighing 42-1-18 Hundredweight (4,750 pounds). It was recovered with the sunken USS Cairo in 1964.

The 32-Pounder of 42-Hundredweight, originally a chambered gun, was developed as part of the 1845 system to be used in the main battery of sloops of war. It was similar in weight to 18-Pounders of an earlier generation of naval guns. In service it used a maximum 6-pound propellent charge to fire it’s 32-pound shot.

By the time of the American Civil War, the 32-Pounder of 42 Hundredweight was a relatively light cannon as far as naval guns were concerned. It was therefore used to arm a number of converted merchant ships taken into naval service.

Unlike the heavier 32-Pounder of 57 Hundredweight which survives in relatively large numbers (over 100 known examples), the 32-Pounder of 42 Hundredweight does not seem to have been kept in US Navy inventories into the 1880s and beyond when cannons began to be donated as monuments. Of the eleven known examples, six were recovered with USS Cairo. Two others were recovered from the wreck of USS Peterhoff.

Rarer still than the cannons of USS Cairo are the surviving carriages, one of which is displayed in the adjacent museum. Very few original wooden carriages survive from the Civil War. The example in the museum is displayed with a partial fiberglass barrel.