Parabola: Thank you! It would have been truly neat for you to acquire that "English" gun (and I was a little surprised by the timing of your post about it here).

These "transitional" guns have all the hallmarks of the earlier Syracuse guns (bushed firing-pins, the 1st version of the "stop-check", the deeply-bolstered frame with the square barrel lug, rounded [instead of flattened] screwheads, etc.) but many "purists" in the LC Smith world do not consider any gun to be a true "Syracuse" Smith without the "LC Smith - maker" stamp on the top rib (perhaps fewer-numbers of Syracuse ID'd guns make for a more-exclusive club of owners?).

The late John Houchins, however, in his truly-substantial tome about these guns (LC Smith "The Legend Lives") counts the very-early production of guns at Fulton in with the total production of guns from the Syracuse operation, and moreover, James Stubbendieck (the man who reviews the historic [& handwritten] records and then authors the "official gun history letters" for many in the LC Smith Organization), in his most recent book on "LC Smith Production Records" also differentiates these early guns from all the later production at Hunter Arms.

[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]

[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]


Much ado about nothing here, I'm sure, but entertaining for me all the same. I was never able to make any sense of these "earlier" Smith guns (at least before these two books were finally written) and there still remains, it seems, some additional mysteries about the numbers of guns produced during this "transitional" period.

These guns are "Americana" at it's finest point of production, I believe, and are darn-seldom encountered. This one came out of Alaska, of all places (!).

Last edited by Lloyd3; 03/25/25 12:20 PM.