I haven’t been taking part in this thread lately - mainly because I’ve run out of decent questions to ask. (The last few I asked were pretty dumb, and easily answered.) The subject of this old revenue cutter kit, though, caught my attention.
We’ve discussed it several times here in the Forum. It is in fact a reboxing of an old Pyro kit that originally appeared in the early '50s, with the name Roger B. Taney. Pyro, in turn, got the design from the Model Shipways solid-hull wood kit, which had originally been released sometime in the late '40s. (Pyro did that to several wood kits from Model Shipways and Marine Models. Other MS kits that ended up as Pyro plastic kits are the Harriet Lane, the tug Dispatch No. 9, and the trawler Hildina. The gents who used to run Model Shipways referred to Pyro as “Pirate Plastics.”) Pyro sold the kit for awhile under the name “Independence War Schooner”; we can’t blame that one on Lindberg.
Here’s a copy of a post I did about it last year:
"The story of the Roger B. Taney kit is actually a little more complicated. Model Shipways introduced its kit sometime in the late 1940s, with that name. The Taney is generally referred to as a member of the Morris class of revenue cutters, which dated from around 1845. Howard I. Chapelle published a set of plans for the class in his book, The History of American Sailing Ships, which was first published in the thirties; the MS plans apparently were based on those drawings. (Chapelle was a good friend of Model Shipways. He provided the plans that were included in the original version of the MS Sultana kit.)
"Unfortunately for MS’s marketing, Chapelle was the type of researcher who never stopped digging. A few years later he found, among the Coast Guard records in the National Archives (the records of the old Revenue Cutter Service were - and still are - notoriously sloppily organized) another contemporary drawing that had the name Roger B. Taney on it. He published a redrawn version of that drawing in his next major book, The History of the American Sailing Navy (1949). It makes it clear that, though the Taney was quite similar to the generic Morris-class plan on which Chapelle had based his original drawing (and MS had based its kit), she differed in some fairly conspicuous respects. (I’d have to dig out the book to comment in detail, but as I remember the Taney’s bow structure, for instance, was more elaborate.) The MS and Pyro/Lindberg kits probably come closer to representing the Morris or the Alexander Hamilton - or perhaps some other member of the class. Unfortunately the documentation on those early revenue cutters is pretty lousy - and the contemporary pictorial evidence about their appearance is worse.
"The most up-to-date tabular listing of them, Paul Silverstone’s The Sailing Navy, 1774-1854, describes this batch of revenue cutters as the “Morris-Taney class.” The listing includes thirteen vessels. Silverstone (who, I think, got his data from the Coast Guard Historian’s Office) lists the basic dimensions of six of them; they’re all different by a few feet (though all have the same registered tonnage: 112). One of them, the Ingham, did serve briefly in the Texas War for Independence. She was sold by the USRC in January, 1846, and purchased by the “Texas Navy,” which named her Independence. Three months later she got captured by the Mexicans and renamed Independencia. So I guess it could be said that the Pyro/Lindberg kit is a model of that ship - though I must say that seems like a rather strange subject for a modeler to pick.
"The last time the IPMS Nationals were held in Virginia Beach, I got a look at a mixed-media *Morris-*class revenue cutter kit from a company called, aptly enough, Cottage Industry Models. The kit - which had a cast resin hull, wood spars, and cast metal and resin fittings, impressed me; I wish I’d been able to afford it. Here’s a link: http://www.squadron.com/ItemDetails.asp?item=CI96003 .
“The old Pyro/Lindberg kit, though, is capable of providing the basis for a good serious scale model as well. Just watch out for the raised lines representing the edges of the closed gunport lids (the lines on the insides and outsides of the bulwarks don’t match), the small boat (whose thwarts don’t reach the gunwales), and a few other 1950s-ish characteristics.”
The evidence is sketchy enough that I guess the name Brutus would work just as well. I don’t think anybody could prove that either the Independence or the Brutus didn’t look like that.
For what it’s worth, here’s a drawing of another member of the class, the Alexander Hamilton, that I did on commission from the Coast Guard Historian’s Office - more years ago than I like to think about: http://www.uscg.mil/history/plans/USRCAlexanderHamilton.jpg .
