For those of you who like a little story with the info I was looking to see how the Hunter Arms Company powered their facility and how the water to work the water wheel arrived there. I had previously read that near the end of the Hunter Arms Company project some of the heavy equipment fell off into the raceway and I was trying to find additional info on the raceway as well as the location of the Hunter Arms Company in Fulton, NY. This lead to the causes of the fall of the Hunter Arms Company of which there were several and using Marlin’s Duolite process to reduce the time of the barrel finishing process from 4 days in a baking soda solution to 4 hours by the Duolite method, but it had a fetish for solder. Some give that 5000 tube sets were finished with Duolite and this barrel finish aspect may be how I was diverted to this tangent/rabbit on the Hunter Arms Company. The I went back to how Lyman Cornelius Smith acquired the assets of W.H. Baker & Sons Company and how L.C. Smith then decided to go with the talented designer Alexander T. Brown for their hammerless. Tom Hunter, etal., got wind of the Smith venture by Harry Comstock, bait/bait bucket fella, who was a Remington salesman. The father of the Hunter boys, John Hunter, Sr. wanted his boys to be in a joint venture so in 1888 the Hunter Arms Company was formed in 1888 and shortly thereafter the Hunter Arms Company acquired L.C. Smith with the stipulation that “L.C. Smith” would be on every double and L.C. Smith went on to typewriters(upper and lower case idea), which along with the Dunlop Tire Company, was the brain-child of Alexander T. Brown of Syracuse, N.Y.(single trigger patent 289062). Hunter also peddled bicycles and fans. “The Gun Works”, as it was known in Fulton on Route 481, was across the street from Morin Brother’s Hardware, adjacent to Black Clawson and made of bricks stamped “Orvis”, which were manufactured in Fulton by a works on Lake Neatahwanta. It was then that I found the part connecting the Hunter Arms Company and the Syracuse Crucible Steel Company with that being the only shred of info for now. While I was view the many interesting pics in the little book I glassed some of the single trigger examples and say Lard. Rich Boyer spelled it A.E. Liads(Allan Edward Lard of St. Joseph, Missouri) and then I began to wonder about his source material but he did interview many of the craftsmen as well as Verna Hunter Wadsworth, daughter of William Hunter, and she surpassed 100 years.
630,061 – couldn’t find it

636050
http://www.google.com/patents?id=uNB1AAA...p;q&f=false


http://www.google.com/patents?id=gadNAAA...p;q&f=false

1011972

668526
http://www.google.com/patents?id=Tn5BAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#

747191

http://www.google.com/patents?id=OL1UAAA...p;q&f=false

After the Lards/Liads saga it was on to the “Lunch Pail Special” along with employees getting examples at cost. When an order was taken, a serial number was issued and then at the end of the day the last serial number was logged and the next day the number sequence began with an example with yesterday’s last serial number + 1. But the examples the employees ordered weren’t issued a serial number until the end of the day and the employee examples were logged into the ledger, this being the reason for multiple longarms with the same serial number. And of course the “Lunch Pail Specials” were mixed numbers in nature. But at any rate the name of the books is “The Hunter Arms Co. And the L.C. Smith Gun” 2nd edition by Rich Beyer and published by R&S Antiques. I think I picked it up from Gunnerman at one of the Vintager events.

One last item center around the lauding that single trigger Smith guns wouldn’t double is the following tale and I can’t say it the longarm in question was a single trigger or not or why the gun discharged:

“Another interesting story was one of the Hunter brothers just paid a dog trainer a huge amount of money for a Setter he had been training for almost a year and the first day out with the dog, his gun went off and killed the dog. Naturally he swore the trainer to secrecy and to get him another dog.”

Kind Regards,

Raimey
rse