I'd be interested in similar documents from either before 1756 or after 1763 to compare the levels of activity for pre war and post war with what we see in these wartime documents.
We all would! Unfortunately, we have never found a daybook that would reveal the work that the gunsmith in Bethlehem or, later, Christiansbrunn did.
We have annual inventories for the Christiansbrunn gunshop, but these documents only reveal the tools and material in the shop at the end of May each year. So they cannot tell us much. If, for instance, the 1769 inventory were to note "four rifles" and the 1770 inventory were to note "four rifles," there's no way to know whether the shop produced no rifles during the course of that year (these are the same "four rifles") or whether the shop produced ten rifles and sold ten rifles (leaving the same number for the inventory). These annual inventories just don't capture the sort of daily work, especially repair work, that the gunsmiths were engaged in.
We can know about some of the work that the gunsmith did from scattered records in other ledgers, which might charge somebody for a gun being mended or a rifle being stocked. But these notations are scattered and few and surely do not capture much of the work being done.
Until a daybook surfaces ... we don't have anything to compare these records to. (And, it's important to note: this only records the repair work that the Bethlehem gunsmith and blacksmith were doing for the Province. Other work that these laborers were doing at the same time isn't captured here.)
