Gun stock architecture

[Hurricane ( of Virginia)]

Including personal conjecture please respond to:  I have wondered about the issue of why we can readily identify a longrifle by its buttstock architecture/style/form as to the school/ region in which it was made. Clearly they are distinctive for the most part. And yet makers in/from one area must have seen gunstocks from many regions during their career. My question is: why was there not more overlap or why did a particular maker not adopt another style ( that of another "school") during his career? Or were there makers that did? If so, name them, please.
Hurricane

[Mark Tyler]

Peter White and Andrew Kopp changed their style to fit each region they lived in.

Andrew Kopp made York, Emmitsburg and Huntingdon guns.
Peter White made Emmitsburg, Bedford and Uniontown guns (a Western Pa / Ohio / Maryland hybrid)

Some makers conformed to the local school others didn't. I would suspect that it was largely customer driven. A Bedford style gun might be a tough sell to a customer in Berks county and vice versa.

[spgordon]

What a great and fundamental question!!

Mark's reply suggests that the schools that we recognize now were also recognized in their own time--so when a maker would move from one place to another he might choose to conform to the style of the region he had moved into.

I suppose customers in one region might be used to guns from that reason and would prefer that style. Or, alternately, one could imagine that customers would prefer a gun that "stood out"--precisely because it differed from the style customary in their area. Either is a plausible motivation for preferring one gun over another.

This got me curious: are there any contemporary documents that refer to these schools (i.e., in which, say, a customer asks for a gun according to a particular style)?

Also: would it be so easy for a maker to shift styles? If one were trained in one style, would it have been easy to re-tool oneself into making a different type of stock?

Scott

[Jim Kibler]

I think a big reason for conformity within a region is apprenticeship and training.  Once a pattern is established and someone becomes familiar with producing a gun to this pattern, there is little reason to deviate from it.  It is what customers are used to and it can be made efficiently. 

[rich pierce]

Andreas Albrecht probably made stepped-wrist rifles when at Christians Spring and seems to have made a straight-up Lancaster style when at Lititz.  He was a true journeyman in his training in Europe and adapting to different styles was something he had probably done before.  Other folks such as Fainot or Newcomer  made distinctive rifles in Lancaster at a time when the Lancaster style had developed and was used as a representative "American rifle" by the British when they designed trade rifles.  So there were individuals who adapted, and others who did it their way.

[The other DWS]

I imagine that it was a combination of things. 
As an apprentice you learned what your master taught you including the rules of thumb and layout techniques he practiced in his shop, whatever they were.  The concept of a journeyman was to travel after you completed your apprenticeship and pick on new and different techniques from other masters for a few years before setting up as your own master. But a basic set of patterns had been engrained at the beginning. Some individuals are more flexible that others. They find it easier to adapt to new techniques and styles.  I suspect that the older you get the more likely you are to stick to the "tried and true" as much as possible unless a new technique comes along that proves to be more profitable.

I think the other driving force I think is the market.  People who's survival depends to any degree on a specific tool are real reluctant to make changes to what works.  A gunsmith who built a good successful rifle, reliable, accurate, and well-priced for the local economy would establish a reputation among his customers and their associates in their region.  His apprentices would naturally follow his successful pattern for the most part.  A gunsmith moving into an area where there was a well established pattern would probably have an uphill struggle unless he conformed to the pattern to a significant extent.  However a smith's reputation would also travel with him and an experienced smith of repute might well be able to introduce a "newer" style to more flexible and probably younger members of the community.

It is harder to factor in population and material culture movement patterns on the "moving frontier".  I wonder how far behind the cutting edge the gun-producers lagged.  Certainly the explorers and hunters on the edge had critical needs, but the nature of frontier settlement and warfare insured that even those well back of the edge had nearly as strong an need for arms of quality.  farther back from the edge I suspect that established settlers could afford arms of a more artistic value.  Then too there is the matter of male competitiveness and the desire to have a "better" gun than our peers

Another thing that has to be factored in somehow is how our perceptions may be skewed by the how and why of the available example base on which we are building those perceptions

[Don Getz]

Unfortunately, George Shumway was not living yet, and they didn't have access to pictures of guns from different regions of Penna. or Virginia.   The strange thing about the various "schools" is, who started the trend within each school?
Having grown up in Snyder county, not far from where Joe Long lived, you can recognize almost any Snyder County gun
just by the butt shape.   Then you can travel north a little to New Berlin or Samuel Baum country and they are slightly
different, but recognizeable.   Most seem to be a take-off from a Berks county gun, but slimmed up a lot.  Interesting, but
no answers...........Don

[The other DWS]

Don, I'm about half convinced that we are the ones who created the "schools" with an "art" approach to comparing and in a sense valuing the old rifles. They simply built the best rifles they could, the way they learned, in the most profit efficient manner possible.  Maybe later as the frontier moved west and the danger of Indian war was reduced the "why" of a rifle shifted from the earlier era.
 Going back through my RCA and books of that era they seem almost overly concerned with the art and architecture and little thought, or at least comment on functionality.

[heinz]

I think one of the issues in "schools" was related to patterns and fixtures. The apprentice likely left the shop with a set of patterns for shaping the various parts.  Patterns and fixtures were how things were done then, one of the mysteries of the trade.  If you had a stock pattern, you knew where the lock would fit within the lines of the stock architecture. If you were trained to do a certain style of carving you would have made the gouges and skew chisels appropriate for that general style.  The apprentice would have learned rules of thumb where the sear went for proper trigger spacing on the wrist, where you wanted the touch hole and how thimbles are spaced.
I often think we would know more about schools if more attention were paid to the mechanical and architectual features.  How you make a trigger guard, how you make the triggers, how you space the thimbles and how you space and pin thimbles and lugs, how you handle the lock screws and tang screws are probably taught behaviours, learned at 13 and passed on to the next apprentice. And they probably involved jigs in many cases that let you do the work quickly and neatly, but also always close to the same.

[spgordon]

This does explain a lot about why schools would have developed and persisted.

But it makes it even odder, though, that a gunsmith would adjust his style to a new region (if indeed gunsmiths did). Given the difficulty of such adjustments, either these schools must have been clearly recognized at the time (so a gunsmith would think: I'm moving to Bedford, I'd better start making Bedford-style rifles) or the customer preference for their local "style" must have been so strong that it exerted influence on the gunsmith.

I take it that instances of gunsmiths adjusting their styles as they moved into a region that had been making rifles differently is rare. Three instances have been offered so far: Kopp, White, and Albrecht.

[mr. no gold]

And then we have anomalies such as N. Beyer of Lebanon, PA and the Lebanon School. I have three rifles by him: the early one is of the 'musket/Lancaster' style of archtecture; the second has the familar Beyer curved stock that pretty generally typifies his work; and the third is a classic Berks County Roman nose stock profile. While I suspect that the preponderance of his work has the curved style, it is interesting to speculate what led him to deveiate from what Beck had instilled into him. Did Peter Berry of nearby Annville inspire him to adopt the curved design? Preferences of the clientele, or just a wild hair? Not likely that we will ever know. Similar differences can be seen in other schools, as well.
And by the way, those who are planning to attend the Maryland Show, be sure to drop by Mike D'Ambra's store and look at the N. Beyer that he turned up recently. It is quite likely the finest one known. He has some other fine Kentucky Rifles that are worth the time it takes to look them over.
Dick

[spgordon]

I've been thinking about DWS's point that "our perceptions may be skewed by the how and why of the available example base on which we are building those perceptions."

The whole attribution business has to depend on certain "conservative" assumptions that would tend to solidify the sense of each school. That is: if an unsigned gun with Lancaster County characteristics shows up, we assume that it was produced in Lancaster County (and perhaps even attribute it to a particular Lancaster County maker), which adds to the "available examples" from Lancaster County.

But it is also possible that a maker in Northampton County imitated Lancaster style--or that the gun was built in Maryland at a much later date by a Lancaster County maker who moved but continued to practice the Lancaster County style. Although these are possibilities, anybody trying to make a solid attribution would have to discard them and assign the gun according to the most "likely" possibility.

Scott

[Shreckmeister]

Wm Shreckengost's early rifles were in the Berks style with Natl Roads keyhole patchboxes later morphing to a unique style more like a Dauphin style yet he lived in neither region however i believe he may have apprenticed under Shenefelt who first worked further east.

[flintriflesmith]

Simon Lauck worked in the Lancaster region for a time, possibly finishing an apprentice working for a family member after dropping out of Morgan's riflemen on their march to Boston, and one of his earliest surviving rifles is an interesting mix of Lancaster and Valley of Virginia. His other work is pretty much mainstream Frederick Co. or Winchester VA.

[fm tim]

At Dixon's. Ron Gabel has given a fascinating description of how Henry Hunsicker's architecture changed as he moved a couple of times from the Lehigh valley up into north central PA.  Each time, he assimilated the local style, and adapted his work to match it.