David: I've never had to stand-up a new business or even make a payroll, but I've watched one happen rather closely. It's always quite daunting.
To buy an ongoing business and then cart it off to a new location, all the while meeting the ongoing payroll...would be quite the undertaking. I suspect that doing it in 1888 wouldn't be quite as complicated as it would be today (alot less bureaucracy to deal with then) but it still would be a monumental task. I know that there were a lot of Hunter Brothers (I think 5, not counting a sister?) so maybe this wasn't as much of a challenge for them at that time(?) but...I suspect that the whole process was still quite the "adventure". The Hunters were financially destroyed much later (in a very suspicious political situation) but at this time they were quite flush by all reports.
As it has been speculated many times before in the literature on this subject (Houchins mainly) and elsewhere of course (I've also likely read about this in threads on previous versions of the LC Smith webpage as well) when the company was relocated, lots of inventory (i.e., unfinished guns and gunmaking materials [including wood, barrels, & actions]) was hauled over to Fulton, NY and production finally got going there at sometime in late 1889 (as you mentioned here earlier). I strongly suspect that the first guns produced in Fulton were all built using parts supplied by the previous iteration of company. It would be the easiest way to get a product onto the market and to get some income flowing (which is critical for any new business). I suspect that many of the "new" employees at Fulton were also from the "earlier" company, so they just continued to build them in a way that they were already familiar with.
After just a few short months, (I'm guessing here) new processes were introduced to help streamline production. This likely accounts for the subtle changes in even the earliest gun's produced there (like no more rounded breech-balls and no engraving on the top ribs?). By late 1892, automatic ejectors were introduced, and by early 1893 all the frames started to look like Fulton guns to me (Houchins stops including Fulton guns with Syracuse production at this point) . The rest, as they say, is history (and evidently lots of it can't be documented).
Last edited by Lloyd3; 03/26/25 03:02 PM.
