Brigadier General
Adelbert R. Buffington

Brigadier General Adelbert R. BuffingtonAdelbert Rinaldo Buffington was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, on 22 November 1837. When he entered the Military Academy in 1856, the standard course was five years in length, and Buffington graduated seventh in the Class of May 1861. He was assigned to Ordnance and immediately placed on duty in Washington, where he trained volunteer soldiers for several weeks. His predecessor, General Daniel W. Flagler, of the Class of June 1861, performed similar responsibilities several weeks following Buffington's departure. He was assigned to the St. Louis Arsenal in June 1861, and by April 1862, was commanding that facility. While organizing the employees of the Arsenal for its defense, Buffington, then a first lieutenant, was commissioned a colonel of volunteers, and he briefly aided in the defense of Pilot Knob, Missouri, with men and artillery pieces. His principal wartime responsibilities consisted of the command of the ordnance depot at Wheeling, West Virginia, his old home, while he concurrently held the post of Chief Ordnance Officer for the District of West Virginia. In 1863, as a captain, he took command of the New York Arsenal, where he spent much time overseeing the rifling of smoothbore cannon and inspecting coastal fortifications along the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida.

For several years following the war, he had charge of breaking up Confederate ordnance establishments in Baton Rouge, Vicksburg, and Galveston, and in 1867, he began a series of assignments at Watertown, Watervliet, and Detroit Arsenals, the latter as commander from 1870 un til 1872. During a tour as Assistant Superintendent of Arsenals of Forts on the seacoast from Charleston, South Carolina, to Mobile, Alabama, in the first part of 1872, Buffington came up with the first of his many ordnance inventions; this one a depressing carriage for a smoothbore seacoast cannon, forerunner of the later disappearing seacoast carriages which he would later develop with William Crozier, later to succeed him as Chief of Ordnance. A succession of further arsenal assignments occupied him during the 1870s, though he also took leave of absence in the years 1875 and 1876 to inspect arms for the Egyptian Government.

By June 1881, Buffington was a lieutenant colonel, and he was moved from command of Watervliet Arsenal to Springfield Arsenal in September of that same year. Here he remained for a decade, during which time he developed a number of inventions, including the steel field carriage for the 3.2 field gun (together with its combined limber, caisson, battery wagon, and forge), the Buffington rear sight for small arms, a ramrod bayonet, the nitre process for bluing the minor parts of small arms, and a gas furnace for small forgings.