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Gordon you wrote:
"Without doing any real  research on the exact date of changes in the
American Nautical Almanac, and I  will take that 1855 was a pivotal year,
I do know that American Nautical  Publications relied heavily on
British Admiralty Publications."

Before  1855, Americans navigated using the British Nautical Almanac as well
as  near-exact reprints published in the US by Blunt, Patten, and others (the
British did not object to this sort of thing for their almanac data).
Starting  with the volume for 1855, we get the first true American almanac. It was
the  "American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac" (AmE&NA) and it was produced
independently. It did not rely on the British almanac (except, no doubt, as a
sanity check). A few years later, in 1858 apparently, the first section of the
AmE&NA was published as a small paperback volume. This was called the
"American Nautical Almanac" (AmNA). It was nothing more than a reprint of that  first
section of the AmE&NA until 1916.

And:
"We did not come  really into our own until after the American Civil War"

It was twenty  years earlier for astronomy.

And:
"Simon Newcomb was, if I remember  right, the main man that really advanced
the Nautical Almanac Office. A top  notch astronomer."

You can read Simon Newcomb's own account of the early  years of the American
almanac online. Here:  http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/slstr10.txt.

-FER
42.0N 87.7W,  or 41.4N 72.1W.
www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars

   

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