There's a lot of good points being brought up here. I think I might have missed something in the thread though - to my knowledge there are no surviving rifles from anywhere in America that are confirmed to have been made here and pre-date the 1760s, are there? So I guess I just don't see any great disparity between the survivial rate of early Pennsylvania rifles vs. Virginia rifles when we are talking about only a handful of documented pre-1770 examples of American longrifles regardless of where they came from.
I think there are a couple of paths going in this thread. "Virginia" longrifles, and possible rifle use in Virginia in the early (pre-1700) colonial period, regardless of where they might have been made.
When you look at the demographics of the earliest settlers (mostly English - the Germans mostly came after 1700), the nature of the earliest settlements (plantations, indentured servants, etc.) and consider that many of the common folks arriving in Virginia in the early to mid 1600s had probably never handled a firearm of any sort before coming over here, much less a rifle, my hunch is that early rifles in Virginia (again I mean pre-1700) would have been brought over or imported by the wealthy or soldiers, as Gary pointed out, and based on the heavy continental influence you see in English sporting guns in the late 1600s, I would suspect that something sort of Jaeger-like would have been seen, even if it came from England. For pre-1650, I have no idea what that gun might have looked like. I have never seen an English rifle of that era, so I have no idea, but perhaps someone on here who knows a lot about very early English firearms could give us an idea. Or would a continental made rifle have shown up in Jamestown? I guess it could have.
I think the whole idea of the Indian trade and its impact on growth of the rifle making culture is fascinating. Hunters, settlers and Natives in the interior would probably be the primary rifle using customers I would think. I don't see that there would have been much demand for rifles in the early Tidewater. Kentucky and Tennesee were still relatively sparsely populated in the 1780s yet big game was already scarce by then. Imagine how early big game would have been hunted out in the Tidewater, settled 150 years earlier. To me, it seems like timing of the migration of German immigration into Virginia in the first half of the 1700s, the opening of the frontier in the Piedmont and Shenandoah Valley (bringing white hunters closer to big-game and spurring trade with Natives who were hunting in the western areas) and the influx of settlers who were establishing smaller, independent communities as opposed to plantation life and were always pushing farther into the frontier for land, were the factors that spurred the longrifle development.
Tim - on your question, unfortunately I don't know of any surviving examples of longrifles identified, documented or even strongly suspected to have been made or used in Virginia before the 1760s, but I guess there are some possibilities given the loose attribution and dates on some of the pieces out there, and to my knolwedge there are literature references to rifles in Virginia I beleive as early as the 1740s or 50s. So they were certainly in use and likely being made there pretty early. But most of the surviving examples of early longrifles attributed or possibly attributed to the south are shown in Shumway's Rifles of Colonial America, Volume 2 and appear to date to the 1760s or later. You do have to take the attributions carefully. There are guns that were grouped in Volume 2 that are now attributed to Pennsylvania, and some in Volume 1 that are now suspected by some to be southern. Many of the guns are unsigned or by undocumented makers, so timeframes and regional attributions are very speculative for some of the guns, and unlike many of the Pennsylvania pieces, many of the guns don't seem to have as strong clear evolutionary ties to later "Golden Age" pieces made in the region so it is a complex puzzle.
Perhaps some of this might be explained by the migratory nature of the Virginia frontier as folks moved up the Valley and over into the Appalachians and beyond over the long period from the 1730s to early 1800s - i.e. perhaps many of the early Virgnia longrifle making families (pre-Rev. period) weren't in one place long enough to see the development of as strong tendencies toward regional styles as there was in eastern Pennsylvania. Once the best land was taken along the Appalachian frontier, i.e. by the 1790s or so, there are numerous surviving examples of longrifles with well defined strong regional and local styles in Virginia - so maybe gunsmiths became more settled after the Revolution, at least east of the mountains. It's fun to think about this stuff and let's hope some new pieces turn up in the future that will shed some light.
Guy
