We know a lot about the Christian's Spring gunshop in which Albrecht & Oerter & Henry worked--but one thing we haven't known is where it was located in the Christian's Spring complex. The gunshop was built 1762-63 and so doesn't appear on an incredibly detailed survey of the property in 1757.
In 1860 James Henry drew a map of Christian's Spring (with all the structures numbered) and a list that identified each structure by number. Unfortunately, only his list, which does include the gunshop, survived.
No map. So that didn't help much.
I recently found, however, that John Woolf Jordan, James Henry's nephew, copied both the map and the list--and both survive at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. As you can see, the gunshop, numbered 14, was at the northwest corner of the settlement, not far from the road that ran through it.
Among other things, this means that the photograph that has too often been identified as the Christian's Spring gunshop wasn't the Christian's Spring gunshop.
I was pretty certain of this anyway, since if the famous "plan" of a gunshop is really the Christian's Spring gunshop, it cannot have been this building: one of the doors of the gunshop would have opened up many feet above the Monocacy Creek--the building in this photograph, that is, was built right alongside the creek. But, thanks to Jordan's map, we now know conclusively that the gunshop in which Albrecht & Oerter worked was at the other end of the complex. The building in this photograph seems to have been a slaughterhouse.
