I recently heard from friend Bill Adams regarding his work with the Massachusetts Antique Arms Collectors’ annual outing. Bill has organized a “historic arms shooting program” in conjunction with the event, which is held every summer. As Bill noted, some collectors are “horror-stricken” at the thought of actually shooting genuine antique arms, anticipating perhaps a loss of value, which is really not a problem with a gun in average condition.
The photos of the program, which are included in this column courtesy of Bill, show the variety of arms made available for shooting, as well as a collector pulling a trigger. Some of those present were pulling a trigger on a gun loaded with live ammunition for the first time ever. Although most of the guns were original antiques, ultra-rare arms like the Revolutionary War Ferguson breech loading flintlock rifle and the Henry repeater, for example, were represented by “authenticized repros.” The event has been quite popular and draws more collectors to the range every year.
This is an excellent program, and I would like to see it introduced in antique arms collector clubs across the country. You really don’t know how a gun works unless you shoot it with live ammunition. I have made it a practice, as a military history writer, to shoot the arms used by soldiers in the era I am writing about, from matchlock muskets – which had surprisingly fast ignition – to M-1 Garands, using live ammunition, not blanks. It has helped me understand what a soldier on the ground was doing during a given battle, and I think it would help non-shooting collectors understand, even more than they do now, that they have custody of historically significant artifacts.
When I was a kid back in the 1950s, one of the several companies importing and selling surplus military arms to the public was Service Armament Company, located in Ridgefield, New Jersey, not too far from my home in Newark. I badgered my father into taking me and a friend over to the Service Armament combination warehouse/store, owned by Valmore “Val” Forgett, an army ordnance corps veteran who had worked at the Aberdeen Proving Ground Museum. Val, whose company advertised in gun magazines as “Ma Hunter” had a huge collection of arms, from rifles to antitank guns, for sale at the time, and, if I recall correctly, many of them had been captured from the Egyptians by the Israelis in the 1957 war. I came home with a Lee Enfield and my friend with a G-43.
Eventually, Service Armament morphed into Navy Arms, one of the first, if not the first, companies to contract with Italian gun makers to manufacture firing reproductions of historic American firearms, at the time the North-South Skirmish Association and historical reenacting were growth industries due to the Civil War Centennial. Over the years Navy Arms has left its New Jersey home and relocated to Martinsburg, West Virginia. The company has recently announced that their Parker-Hale Whitworth, a reproduction of the original used by selected Confederate sharpshooters, is on the way back to production status and the Italian made gun will be on the market shortly, with an American walnut stock, genuine bone charcoal case hardened hammer and lockplate and the original style hexagonal bore.
A friend of mine who is an antique arms expert, as well as a shooter, advised me that he saw one of the new Navy Arms Whitworths at this year’s Baltimore Gun Show and sent me a critical appraisal. He reported that: “The fit and finish was excellent. The casehardening is quite colorful, much more brilliant than encountered on most repro arms. The gun is “pretty,” although a bit heavy, and in keeping with the P-H, Euroarms and Pedersoli tradition of doing things almost right, has P53 style mounts. I bet that if the Rifle Shoppe or someone else made proper nose caps, butt plates and trigger guards for the repro Whitworths, there would be a lot of upgrades. A proper ramrod would also be a plus. None of these aspects affect shooting, of course. The gun looked impressive and should shoot well.” For more information on the Whitworth, see: http://navyarms.com/ ParkerHaleWhitworth.php
Henry Rifles first came on the market in the summer of 1862 in Kentucky and, ironically, the first purchasers were probably Confederate raiders. In the last three years of the war, the fast firing Henry became a favorite arm of a number of Union soldiers, particularly in the Western Theater of the conflict, who bought the guns with their own money. The only Henrys actually purchased by the federal government were those requested by slightly shady but influential Colonel Lafayette Baker for his 1st District of Columbia Cavalry regiment. Some of these ended up in Confederate hands through capture and may have been the Henrys allegedly carried by Jefferson Davis’ bodyguard. Leftovers were offered to men who enlisted as Veteran Volunteers in the last months of the war. Production of Henrys was never on the scale of the rival Spencer, and most of them were sold on the commercial market. In October 1864, you could buy a Henry, described in an advertisement as a “fifteen shot rifle… that should be in every hunter’s hands,” at C. Proal’s hardware store in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Joseph G. Bilby received his BA and MA degrees in history from Seton Hall University and served as a lieutenant in the 1st Infantry Division in 1966-1967. He is Assistant Curator of the New Jersey National Guard and Militia Museum, a freelance writer and historical consultant and author or editor of 20 books and over 400 articles on NJ and military history and firearms, and as publications editor for the NJ Civil War 150 Committee edited the award winning New Jersey Goes to War. He has received an award for contributions to Monmouth County (NJ) history and an Award of Merit from the NJ Historical Commission for contributions to the state’s military history.