7-Inch Triple Banded Brooke Rifle

May 11

Triple banded Brooke Rifle on display at Fort Moultrie

Part of the extraordinary collection of sea coast artillery at Fort Moultrie on Sullivans Island outside of Charleston, the Seven-Inch Triple-Banded Brooke Rifle is (I believe) the only surviving example of its type and perhaps one of only three made. The triple banding of wrought iron loops over the cast iron tube provided strength for heavier powder charges and/or heavier ammunition for the piece compared to its double-banded cousins. This extra reinforcing may well have made this Brooke a more potent danger to the monitors of the blockading squadron. However, the design also prevented the trunnions from being part of the cast portion. As the two photos from the Library of Congress included with this post show, the Brooke originally had a trunnions as part of an additional band which is now lost. Markings on the Brooke give the original weight as 21,290 pounds. Warren Ripley's excellent book "Artillery and Ammunition of the Civil War" tells an entertaining story of the post-war history of the Brooke - it ended up half-buried on what became the campus of the Porter Military Academy and was dug out and moved "by sheer boy-power" across the campus for display by the class of 1913. Linked in the comments is also a 1997 paper by Mike Ryan titled "The Historic Guns of Forts Sumter and Moultrie" which is a very helpful source of information.