Well, as I promised I've been doing a lot of reading, and I realize why you guys didn't all jump on here and echo the same answer over and over again. In my research, I've learned that, before the Continental Congress got moving on the Continental Army and it's supplies including firearms in about 1777-1778, the Committees of Safety, Colony legislatures, and sometimes even just the concerned citizens who banded together, equipped militia units with a wide variety of weapons, including: arms captured during the French-Indian war, arms re-built by local gunsmiths, private arms brought by the men from home, arms seized from loyalists, and arms contracted by the legislatures, Committees of Safety, and other revolutionary organizations from many gunsmiths. Even after Congress started working on the problem, supply was so limited, there was still a wide variety with Brown Bess pattern and later French Charleville patterns being made at the arsenals, and then of course there was the "aide" which was being shipped in from Europe by buyers, such as Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee...
NOW, I get it! There's no one answer. At all!
Luckily in my reading, I did run across a spicy little tidbit. Remember, my ancestors were in South-Western Massachusetts and Central Connecticut. (If you draw a line dissecting Connecticut into eastern and western halves, my family would live along that line and on into Massachusetts along the CT border (Granville, MA), about where that line would stick up into the belly of Western MA., just west of what we call Springfield, MA today.
So, the spicy tidbit: I found one reference (which sited Moller's American Military Shoulder Arms, Vol. I, which sounds like a book I need to find, because many of the articles I've been reading keep citing it) which said an important detail: Most of Connecticut's iron works which were the sources of barrels and locks were centered around the northwestern town of Goshen, CT. That's pretty close to where my ancestors were.
I'm guessing, if his militia needed muskets, that would have been a place close by they could buy them; although as I type that, I wonder, since production was so limited, if Connecticut legislature and committees of safety would have had a monopoly on their production... The article also said there were about 2500-3000 gunsmiths in colonial America, with Pennsylvania being the primary colony producing firearms. I suppose western Massachusetts would have had their own local gunsmiths. So, more reading and searching!
