His full name was Mark Barton Burnham (1895-1995), was a native of Forest Park, GA, but moved to Savannah in 1924, and established himself as a fifth generation gun-maker though I believe this was only a part time venture. He and his wife, Lillian, only had the one child, a daughter, formerly Mrs. S.L. (Myra Burnham) McDonald (1921-2013) of Garden City, GA. The McDonald's had owned and operated a gas station on Main Street (Old U.S. 17) for several years. For some years, Mark co-owned and operated a gun shop off U.S. 17 South in the Silk Hope area, south of Savannah, which after his wife's death in 1972 he sold out his interest to his partner Mack McGeehan (afterwards Mack's Gun Shop) and Mark moved to Moncks Corner, SC, near Charleston, and set up a small shop making guns, molds, and powder horns among his many other inventions. He held a U.S. patent for a swing door closer (1929), and built all his own machines to make the various articles he sold. Obviously, many have seen his powder flasks and molds, but to watch him make a mold was a privilege.
He made not only these fine made powder horns but made the dial measures from scratch, like everything else he made. Many companies produce powder measures but few throw precisely the right charge every time. Mark’s powder measures will throw a measure (in grains or drams) that is correct to the nearest grain.
For his long rifles, he made everything except the natural materials, steel, wood, brass, and silver solder. He made his barrels from solid steel billets, drilling the bores by hand using a horizontal boring machine of his own design, and even filed the flats for all his octagonal barrels. All of his parts were hand-made. Mrs. Myra McDonald once showed me the flintlock rifle her father had made for her, and then demonstrated how when the hammer was released against the frizzen, it didn’t just throw a few sparks into the pan. It was akin to a lighting storm of sparks. Mark laminated his frizzens with soft iron onto a steel frizzen, which guaranteed it would spark each and every time.
Dixie Gun Works still sells his flint sharpener that he invented in the mid-1970s, though now that Turner, Hunter, and many of the older folks at Dixie are gone, few know how it worked. When he showed it to Turner Kirkland, he said that it would keep a flint sharp for 125 consecutive sparkings. Turner asked him why only 125 times, to which Mark replied how his hands got tired of cocking the hammer and tripping the sear.
For those who have examined the locks on his rifles and pistols, I need not say a thing, but for everyone else, it is unlike any lock action you have ever seen, and according to Mark, he was the fifth generation to build this style lock. Unlike the multitude of other firearms which required locks to be inlet into the stock, weakening the most critical portion of the stock at the breech end of the barrel where absorbs the recoil of the gun, Mark’s locks were inlet barely the depth of the lock-plate itself, about an eighth of an inch, with the working mechanisms (i.e. tumbler, mainspring, sear, sear spring) all mounted on the exterior.
Like his hammer, none of the external parts were held in place by screws but where riveted in place, and could not be disassembled or dismounted nor would they ever need to ever be. The hammer formed the tumbler, and enclosed a coiled watch spring within a cavity incised inside the hammer holding tension against the lock-plate, with the sear notches cut into the rear outward edge of the hammer body so that only the trigger-end of the sear was the only part required to be inlet into the stock. It immediately emerged and pivoted on the rear of the plate, engaging the sear notches directly. Lubrication was simple. Simply brush off the entire external mechanism with a lubricant/preservative. Once you have seen one of his locks, you will wish all your BP locks were this simple.
In my 40+ years of collecting and shooting, muzzle-loaders mostly, I have not seen any lock mechanism like the Burnham lock employing a coiled watch spring as a mainspring. The nearest of any lock mechanism made to the Burnham lock is the wheel-lock of the early sixteenth century, which similarly used a coil spring for the mainspring around which the drum rotated like a watch-spring.
I could only have wished to have had the privilege to have apprenticed under Mark as his grandson did. His grandson, Steve McDonald was an Eagle Scout in the same Boy Scout troop that my father was Scoutmaster, and Steve and I not only grew up together but were assistant scoutmasters for the same troop when we got too old to be Boy Scouts. But Mark Burnham was a fine gentleman to have known. I have one of his bullet molds and a powder horn, each made before I was born.
