This is too funny.
On 20 November 1775 the Lancaster County Committee of Observation forced Lancaster's riflemakers to make muskets to satisfy the county quota. Threatened to be branded enemies of the state, many of the county's gunsmiths--Christian Jack, Peter Reigart, Michael Wither, Jacob Kraft, John Miller, Peter Gonter, George Frederick Fainot, John Graeff, Christopher Breidenhart, Peter Reasor, Jacob Dickert, John Henry—came before the committee to promise that they would “lay by all other kind of Work and begin to make Muskets & Bayonets for this County.”
Today I learned that on 30 December the committee made a surprise inspection of the gunsmiths houses--and they caught several of them in the act of making rifles! John Graeff was "making a Rifle at the time of the inquiry" and John Henry was "at Rifle work when inquiry was made." "Some rifle work appeared" at the shops of John Miller and Peter Gonter. No rifle work at Christopher Breidenhart's, but he had "not done or prepared himself with any thing towards making Muskets."
At Jacob Dickert's: of "all his Hands, but one at Rifle Work." Dickert "is putting old Crown Locks" on the muskets, "and Says the Locks are as good as those that are made here."
