Cartridge Collecting Question

If this is the incorrect forum please let me know.
In my collection I have an empty, never loaded, black paper shotgun shell. The headstamp is US Cartridge Company Lowell Mass. Primer is small and stamped US one on top of the other. The shell is 5 and 5 /16 inches long with a rim diamter of 1.85 and a base of 1.48 inside at mouth is about .960. What do I have?
Charlie

Doesn't fit any commercial shotshell, even an 8 guage. So I'd have to assume it is either industrial (such as the slugs used to clean the inside of boilers and smokestacks and concrete kilns) or military. With an inside diameter near 1" could it be a blank or canister shell for an old 1" Hochkiss repeating cannon? The canister I've seen was brass cased, so I would guess a saluting blank. Just a WAG.

Or it might be for some long obsolete salute/signal gun; there were many of these used by the military, Coast Guard, and yachtsmen. We used to have one when I was in Sea Explorers that was breech loading and used 10 ga. shells. (Teenagers and cannon, a bad combination if there's not a senior NCO handy.....).

It's OLD; USCC hasn't been around for a LONG time!

Thanks Mike, I never thought of it being a canister shell for the Hotchkiss...I was told years ago it was a 2 gauge for a punt gun. The excessive length is they were hand loaded and cut to the length the reloader wanted.
regards Charlie

Charles, that information from "years ago" is as likely to be right as anything I know! Certainly the manufacturers back in those days would do anything a guy would pay for, and commercial hunting of waterfowl was a big business.

In California it was such a big business along San Francisco Bay and up the Central Valley (originally almost all wetlands), that there were several powder mills on SF Bay just to provide ammo for market hunters.

Waterfowl were cleaned and plucked, packed in barrels of brine (salt was another big local industry), and shipped all over the world. When the huge wetlands were drained for agriculture, the industry crashed along with the waterfowl population.