The Henry Family of GunsmithsThe Henry family worked as gunsmiths in Pennsylvania for nearly two hundred years. Attention has typically focused on “five generations” of Henry gunsmiths: William Henry of Lancaster (1729-86); his eldest son William Henry (II) of Nazareth (1757–1821); his sons J. Joseph Henry (1786–1836) and William Henry III (1794–1878); James Henry (1809–95), only child of J. J. Henry; and James Henry’s son, Granville Henry (1832–1912). For nearly a century, the Henrys produced guns in Northampton County at the Boulton gunworks, built on the Bushkill Creek in 1812 by William Henry III and run, after 1822, first by J. Joseph Henry and then by his son and grandson.
The visibility of the Boulton gunworks, however, has obscured the full picture of the Henry gunsmiths in several ways. The exclusive focus on the family line that ended up in Boulton has left other Henry gunsmiths entirely in the shade: historians look back to William Henry of Lancaster but remain silent about his gunsmith brothers, John Henry and Moses Henry, or research William Henry of Nazareth but ignore his brother, Abraham Henry, who worked as a gunsmith for two decades in Lancaster County. The visibility of Boulton has also elevated a particular model of gunsmithing—the career gunsmith, embodied by J. Joseph Henry and his descendants—that does not fit some of the family’s earlier gunsmiths. Most significantly, this model has led us to misunderstand the career of the celebrated patriarch of this gunsmithing family, William Henry of Lancaster, who did not, as is often claimed, “manufacture…firearms for over thirty years” (
Henry of Boulton, 5). He worked as a gunsmith only for a decade, perhaps, early in his career (Gordon, “Ambitions of William Henry”).
John Henry (16??-c. 1747)—an immigrant from Ireland, the father of William Henry of Lancaster—seems to have been the first Henry to practice gunsmithing in Pennsylvania. A John Henry, who died in Lancaster County around 1747, possessed gun barrels, locks, and “a parcel of small tools for stocking [or making] of guns.” Although late in life William Henry stated that his father had died in 1744 or 1745 (“in my fifteenth year”), this discrepancy may be due to a faulty recollection or because the 1747 inventory was taken some time after John Henry’s death. (Gordon, "Patriarch”). It seems likely that the John Henry who possessed these gunsmithing tools was the father of William Henry of Lancaster.
Three of John Henry's children became gunsmiths.
William Henry of Lancaster (1729-86) apprenticed to the Moravian gunsmith Mathias Roesser (1708-71) in the mid- to late-1740s, after his father's death. Presumably Henry set up independently as a gunsmith in Lancaster by the early 1750s. Moravian records for the congregation at Shamokin on the Susquehanna mention the arrival of “a gunsmith from Lancaster” named “Billy Henry" in April 1754.
"A gunsmith from Lancaster came here and spent the night. His name is Billy Henry." April 20, 1754, Shamokin Diary.Henry served as a gunsmith for the Pennsylvania troops that built Fort Augusta in 1756 and served as armorer for the Virginia troops in summer 1758. Henry’s choice to pursue these government services separated him from the many other gunsmiths practicing in Lancaster County. Soon after, however, Henry was able to cease working as a gunsmith, to abandon the forge, entirely. In 1759 he established a partnership with Joseph Simon, a prosperous merchant and entrepreneur in Lancaster, and in 1760 Henry traveled to England in order, as the minister Thomas Barton reported, "to settle a Correspondence & Trade." When he returned in spring 1761, he worked as a merchant and shopkeeper and rose quickly in Lancaster’s cultural circles. He began to serve in a wide range of public offices. He joined the revolutionary movement and, by the late 1770s, had become a major procurement officer who supplied shoes, hats, flour, and guns—none of which he manufactured himself—to state and continental forces (Gordon, “Ambition of William Henry”; "Martial Art").
Two of Henry's brothers were gunsmiths.
John Henry (17??-1777) worked in Lancaster County throughout the 1760s until his death. A 1765 Lancaster tax list identifies John Henry as a “gunsmith”; it records William Henry as an “ironmonger.” The 1773 tax list, describing “William Henry, Esq.” as a “store keep[er],” again identifies John Henry as “gunsmith."
Receipt for rifle that John Henry made for the Philadelphia merchant John Inglis (1708-1775)In June 1773, John Henry traveled to Detroit to sell his rifles, but he seems to have returned to Lancaster due to a lack of business (William Henry Papers, 1759–1826). Another brother,
Moses Henry (1746?-1789), was by 1766 at Fort Pitt repairing guns for the firm of Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan. He moved in the early 1770s to a Shawnee village called Chillicaathee. In August 1772, Moravian records from Lititz note a visit from William Henry’s brother, a “gunsmith among the Shawnees.” Moses Henry spent the last decade of his life at Vincennes on the Wabash River (Gordon, “The Henrys and the West”). Although both John and Moses Henry had sons, none became gunsmiths.
William Henry of Lancaster helped two of his children become gunsmiths. He sent his eldest son,
William (1757–1821), to Lititz, where in June 1771 he apprenticed to Andreas Albrecht. In 1776 Moravian church authorities removed William Henry, Jr., from Lititz because of personal indiscretions; it relocated him to a small all-male community near Nazareth, Christian’s Spring, which had a gunshop supervised by Christian Oerter (1747-77). Henry worked there, "occasionally employed repairing Arms which arrived at Easton from Camp" during the Revolutionary War (Henry Family Papers, 1758-1909), until he built a home with a gunshop in Nazareth in 1780. The house seems to have been 70 x 180 and the plans called for Henry to “dig out under the entire house”: “the one half he will use as a cellar and the other half for the workshop.” William Henry of Lancaster gave his son “at first $3,000 Congress money, and will give him still more, so that he will have £1,600.00. Then the father will give him also glass, nails, an anvil, bellows, and a 1⁄2 a ton [of] iron” (Nazareth Congregational Diary quoted in Gordon, “Considerable Building”).
In 1781, William Henry of Lancaster sent another son,
Abraham (1768-1811), to his elder brother in Nazareth to learn the gunsmithing trade and to help out in the shop that, only months before, William Jr. had established there. Abraham remained in Nazareth until 1787, after which he returned to Lancaster: his father had died the previous year. Abraham Henry remained a practicing gunsmith in Lancaster until his death, producing longrifles of the highest quality. [For a longrifle made by Abraham Henry, presumably in the 1790s after he returned to Lancaster, see
https://americanlongrifles.org/forum/index.php?topic=3114.0] Partnered with John Graeff, Abraham Henry received a government contract in 1798 for 2,000 muskets (Stewart and Reid, “Pennsylvania Contract Muskets"). A decade later, however, Abraham was (one of his brothers reported) "in a very degraded condition": he "neglects his business" and, too often drunk, would be "pickt up in the Streets or on the Commons and of course is out of Credit" (William Henry to James Henry, June 8, 1810, Burton Historical Collection). Abraham was the last Henry to practice gunsmithing in Lancaster County.
William Henry, Jr., seems to have worked steadily as a gunsmith during his early years in Nazareth. He produced, perhaps with his younger brother’s help, a beautiful “pair of pistols, silver mounted” that he presented to his father in Lancaster sometime before 1786 (John Joseph Henry to William Henry II, Jan. 14, 1807, William Henry Papers, 1759–1826). But William Henry had to play a variety of roles in the Nazareth Moravian community and for many years had to limit—or abandon entirely—his gunsmithing activities. In 1794, Henry told Nazareth authorities that he “would like to give up his joiner-work and…is willing to begin again his trade, making stocks for the guns,” but authorities refused (Gordon, “Considerable Building”).
In 1798, however, William Henry secured a government contract for 2,000 muskets. (In Lancaster, as we have seen, his brother Abraham earned a similar contract.) The need for increased production led him to build the first Henry gunworks on the Bushkill Creek (often misdated to 1792). Henry later recalled that he “erect[ed] a considerable Building on Bushkill Creek for grinding & boring of Barrels and polishing, [and] also Smith Shops and file Shops.” This factory had only a short life: when he completed his government contract in 1803, Henry converted this works to a grist mill. William Henry’s Nazareth shop continued to produce guns, however, and he continued to train young men as stockers (Gordon, “Considerable Building”).
In 1808-1809, William Henry entered into another government contract, this time in partnership with his eldest son.
John Joseph Henry (1786–1836) had begun his training with his father, perhaps during the years that the Bushkill gunworks were operating (1799-1803), and later spent three months in Shippensburg—where Henry Albright, son of Andreas Albrecht, was working—to “perfect himself in his trade.” In 1806 Joseph was back in Nazareth working for his father. In summer 1807, however, Joseph opened a factory in Philadelphia on North Third Street, which remained active for nearly fifteen years. This factory employed some fifty workmen.
There Joseph instructed his younger brother,
William Henry III (1794–1878), who had begun his training in 1807 under his father “in the old Factory…at Nazareth," "filing gun mountings and making parts of rifles.” In October 1810 William III was sent to work, mostly making locks, at his brother’s factory in Philadelphia. During the War of 1812 Joseph Henry’s Philadelphia factory supplied muskets to Delaware and Maryland and, with George Tryon of Philadelphia, produced seven-barreled multi-shot weapons and repeating muskets with two separate flintlock mechanisms mounted on the same barrel. Joseph Henry also produced swords at this time (
Henry of Boulton, 14; Gabel).
It is not known how William Henry in Nazareth and his son Joseph in Philadelphia divided labor or responsibilities for their 1808-09 government contract. But it was, as his son recalled, the increased production required by such contracts that led William Henry II to envision a new gunworks on the Bushkill in 1810. The building of Boulton seems to have been financed by William Henry II, but his son, William Henry III, managed the project. In April 1812, William III returned home from Philadelphia and “commence[d] felling timber for the new factory.” It took him “some six months” to complete the factory and six months more for the other buildings, which included a boarding house, a smith shop, and a coal house. Boulton employed some eighty workmen who produced “musket barrels, rifle barrels, pistols for cavalry arms, sword hilts, files, musket and rifle locks” (William Henry III, “Autobiographical Sketch”). Busy in Nazareth and with many other projects, including the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, William Henry II left this establishment to the “care and superintendence” of his young son. It seems likely that William Henry II’s involvement in the gun industry ended about this time, though he sold his interest in the Boulton works to his two sons only in March 1817 for $10,000 (Henry Family Papers, 1758-1809). William Henry II died, in Philadelphia, in 1821.
William Henry III at Boulton and Joseph Henry at Philadelphia worked together on Henry gun contracts for nearly a decade. But the Boulton works was not as profitable as the Henrys had expected. William Henry III blamed this on new standards imposed by government inspectors, which prevented the Henrys from completing a large government contract—secured in 1812 to supply 10,000 muskets—and made it difficult to secure subsequent ones (Carden, "Henry Gun Works"). After the death of his father, William Henry III decided to leave the gun industry. (He later opened a general store at Wind Gap, operated the ironworks at the Oxford Furnace in New Jersey, and surveyed the land that became Scranton, Pa.) William Henry III sold his share in the Boulton operations to his brother Joseph, who sold his factory in Philadelphia and returned to Northampton County in November 1822 to assume sole proprietorship of Boulton. The Boulton works were now the only Henry gun operation in Pennsylvania.
James Henry (1809–95), the only child of Joseph and Mary Rebecca Henry, began assisting his father at the Boulton gunworks in 1831, although James’s interests seemed more scholarly than entrepreneurial: he trained at the Moravian Theological Seminary, became a teacher at Nazareth Hall in 1829, continued to write on historical subjects throughout his long life, and founded the Moravian Historical Society in 1857. He was compelled, however, to assume proprietorship of the Boulton business when his father died in 1836 at the age of 50.
Granville Henry (1832–1912) would join his father in the running of Boulton by the early 1850s, after which Henry guns sported “J. HENRY & SON” on its locks and barrels. Boulton changed significantly during the years that James and Granville Henry oversaw operations. It began to produce percussion, rather than flintlock, arms; it supplied many “plains rifles”—half-stock percussion arms with thick-walled octagonal barrels—for the western trade; and, after the Civil War, it made breechloading rifles and shotguns. However, Boulton did not invest in machine tools that could increase production, as other manufacturers did, which ensured that Boulton would remain a small operation in a field increasingly dominated by giant factories. Boulton could not come close to matching the production of large operations in Philadelphia, Hartford, and New York during the Civil War (
Henry of Boulton).
Boulton in Ruins, 1936Gun production ended at Boulton in 1895, though the factory continued to assemble guns from parts on hand for another decade. Granville Henry, the last proprietor of Boulton, died in 1912.
Works Cited- Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, Detroit, MI.
- Carden, James T. "The Henry Gun Works and the Impact of the Federal Contract System (1808-1830). MA Thesis, Lehigh University, 1998.
- Gabel, Ron. “J. Henry War of 1812 Artillery Noncommissioned Officer’s Sword.” Jacobsburg Record 35 (2008): 4. https://www.jacobsburghistory.com/newsletters/
- Gordon, Scott Paul. “The Ambitions of William Henry.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 136 (2012): 253-84.
- Henry, William III. “Autobiographical Sketch.” Jacobsburg Historical Society, Boulton, PA.
- Henry, William III. “Why I Did not Amass Wealth” [1872]. Jacobsburg Historical Society, Boulton, PA.
- Henry Family Papers, 1758-1909, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE.
- Henrys of Boulton. Jacobsburg Historical Society, 1988. Boulton, PA.
- Nazareth Congregational Diary, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA.
- Stewart, David A. and William M. Reid, “Pennsylvania Contract Muskets—1797 Arms Procurement Act.” ASOAC Bulletins No. 91: https://americansocietyofarmscollectors.org/bulletinindex.htm
- William Henry Papers, 1759–1826, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
Other Sources about the Henry Family- Beck, Herbert H. "William Henry: Progenitor of the Steamboat, Riflemaker, Patriot." Papers Read before the Lancaster County Historical Society 54, no. 4 (1950): 65-88.
- Bell, Whitfield J., Jr., “William Henry (1729–1786),” in Patriot-Improvers: Biographical Sketches of Members of the American Philosophical Society. Philadelphia, 1997.
- Gabel, Ron and Bob Sadler. "The Henrys: Gunsmiths and Arms Manufacturers." ASOAC Bulletin #93. https://americansocietyofarmscollectors.org/bulletinindex.htm
- Gordon, Scott Paul. “Entangled by the World: William Henry of Lancaster and ‘Mixed’ Living in Moravian Town and Country Congregations,” Journal of Moravian History 8 (2010): 44–45
- Hutchins, Joseph. “The American Screw Auger." Chronicle of the Early American Industries Association 64, no. 3 (2011): 89–107.
- Jordan, Francis Jr., The Life of William Henry, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1729–1786: Patriot, Military Officer, Inventor of the Steamboat. Lancaster, PA, 1910. https://books.google.com/books?id=LGxBAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
- Sandwick, Charles W. Jacobsburg: A Pennsylvania Community and its People. Jacobsburg Historical Society, 1985.
[/list][/list][/list][/list][/list]
