WHY WHY WHY ???

[A Scanlan]

Maybe I should think about this a little before posting...

Makes me wonder how accurate are our perceptions of life in about 1800 on the expanding frontier are.  In most of the limited reading I have done I concluded a gunsmith actually had a shop and a place of business where he made, repaired and sold guns.  I never concluded a gun maker would have a "side hustle".  Yet I always thought that a gun maker would/could have a variety of related skills, i.e., blacksmith, wood worker, etc.  And a "farmer" then as a farmer today "knows stuff and can fix things" (as stated on a t-shirt I recently saw).  But would not some part of the equation involve evaluation of effort, reward and risk?  Why would one make guns if it were not financially rewarding?   Why labor in the hot sun behind a teem of mules when one could engage a helper or two and build guns?  Seasonal factors aside our research on George Peterman gave me a peak at his life more so than his gun making.

George Peterman of Botetourt County, VA had a much different life that John Sites of Botetourt County and while the time frames were not exactly the same they lived two very different  lives.  Sites fits my perception of a gun maker of 1825.  Peterman does not.

[rich pierce]

I'm not knowledgeable in the economics of the times, but note that there are some pretty substantial and impressive barns on eastern Pennsylvania farms from that period.  This suggests that farming was able to provide a decent living.  It's possible that gunsmithing was sometimes the side job for wintertime or rainy days for some who are listed as farmers in the census, but are known gunsmiths from our perspective.

Even now when I look at the large 10 room 2-story house and the barns and outbuildings of the farm where I grew up, on just 120 acres of mixed decent hilly fields, thin-soiled pasture, and rough woodlot, I have to conclude that farming in the later 1800s to 1920s provided a good income for those times.

[smart dog]

Hi,
The idea of gunmaking as a wintertime occupation in the 18th and early 19th centuries always intrigued me.  Short days, low levels of light, cold, heating requirements to apply and dry finishes all make me skeptical that gunmaking was a winter thing.  I think in winter farmers and most people spent a lot of energy keeping warm, preserving food, perhaps hunting, sustaining livestock, splitting firewood, and digging out from snow much less working at gunsmithing.  I don't think winter was a "down time" affording other activities like gunmaking. 

dave

[Shreckmeister]

On the other other hand, if you were a farmer, and your boys were splitting the firewood, and your wife was preserving the food, you had time to sell Guns to provide some income during the winter.  The air is dryer in the winter and with a decent heat source in your shop. I think they finishes Wood dry.

Hi,
The idea of gunmaking as a wintertime occupation in the 18th and early 19th centuries always intrigued me.  Short days, low levels of light, cold, heating requirements to apply and dry finishes all make me skeptical that gunmaking was a winter thing.  I think in winter farmers and most people spent a lot of energy keeping warm, preserving food, perhaps hunting, sustaining livestock, splitting firewood, and digging out from snow much less working at gunsmithing.  I don't think winter was a "down time" affording other activities like gunmaking. 

dave

[A Scanlan]

This may seem like a shift in the topic but not so.  Peterman signed rifles are few.  I only know of 2 maybe a third, one of which is on a flash drive from the KRA on VA guns.  The Peterman household had many people in the census of 1820 and 1830, maybe as many as 12 in 1830.  He has a wife and 3 daughters and added a son in 1827.  So that's 6 "Peterman's".  Who are the other 6 or 7 and what did they do?  Apprentices?  Maybe but also maybe "production workers" making guns as products of the Peterman "shop" while George tended to his farm.  Maybe George ran a gun makers business but did not actually make guns so much himself and maybe the products were more generic in character than those linked directly to George.  So was the "shop" a place where a experienced gun maker could go to use the Peterman facilities (for a fee) making guns in their own style as opposed to the Peterman style?

No evidence exists that I know of to support this wild idea but still??

I have a Peterman "styled" rifle with the initials on the barrel of W E D  OR W & D.  Who actually made it and under what conditions?

BTW, the one on the KRA flash drive has a crude printed signature as I recall.  George's signature on scores of documents in the clerks office was consistent in style over the years of 1803 to 1843, very artistic.  Who scratched the name on the one in the KRA flash drive?

[spgordon]

Also: it would be a mistake to assume that the riflemakers that we value today were valued in their own time.

In the early 1760s, Johann Valentine Beck, who had come to the communal settlement of Bethlehem in October 1761 but because there was so little work for a gunstocker was assigned to work with the children (as Andreas Albrecht was as well), wanted to move to Lititz and begin again his trade of gun stocker. Authorities advised that, because there would be so many gunmakers in nearby Lancaster, he had little chance of making a living. So he didn't move to Lititz.

When Albrecht did move to Lititz in 1771, there is good evidence that--despite what he had hoped--he was not able to earn much of a living as a riflemaker either.

So nobody thought: "boy, they make more impressive rifles than anybody else--they'll sell!"

[Seth Isaacson]

You have to imagine that same issue continued for smaller scale gunmakers throughout the 19th century.  A lot of the advertisements I've seen over the years seem to spend as much time talking about repair work, imported shotguns, and then briefly mention "made to order" rifles and pistols. American shotguns were pretty limited by the cheap imports from Birmingham and Belgium really into the early 20th century, and you start to get mass produced rifles from shops in Pennsylvania that the smaller scale "bespoke" rifle makers would have had to compete with. The economy of the early 19th century was heavily based on agriculture, and we were exporting a lot of agricultural products, including most of the world's cotton being grown using slave labor in the South.