doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Presidential Iron

Any of our past or present Presidents devoted to the doublegun?? I remember the first President Bush, receiving a Hatfield, TR got his fox for Africa. President Nixon, I believe presented Brezhnev with a grand american.

Eisenhower was a Winchester 21 man.

Grover Cleveland's eight gauge Colt is in the National Firearms Museum.

Benjamin Harrison had an Optimus Grade Lefever (10-bore as I recall).

In his book, Steel Canvas, R.L. Wilson claims that a member of the Glahn family of engravers (from surviving family records) engraved a special Syracuse Arms Company gun for Teddy Roosevelt. All I can say is that I ain't found the piece.........yet!

Grover c. 1907



May 6, 1905
http://www.la84foundation.org/SportsLibrary/SportingLife/1905/VOL_45_NO_08/SL4508021.pdf
Ex-President Grover Cleveland has received many lashings because he went fishing and duck shooting. It was charged at various times that these health-seeking excursions were intended as a cloak to cover dissipation. The ex-President has at last turned on his critics and in a magazine devoted to country-loving folk, he ably defends hunting and fishing and says he is proud of his own devotion to the sport, even though it has subjected him to petty forms of persecution. He adds:
"Thus when short fishing excursions, in which I sought relief from the killing vexations and perplexities of official duty, have been denounced in a mendacious newspaper as dishonest devices to cover scandalous revelry, I have been able to enjoy a sort of pleasureable contempt for the author of the accusation while congratulating myself on the mental and physical restoration I had derived from these excursions. So, also, when people, more mistaken than malicious, have wagged their heads in pitying fashion and deprecated my guiltiness of hunting and fishing frivolity in high public service, I have found it easy to lament the neglect of these amiable persons to accumulate for their delectation a fund of charming reminiscence of sport, while, at the same time, I have sadly reflected how their dispositions might have been sweetened and their lives made happier if they had yielded to the particular type of frivolity which they deplored."

A special shotgun with ARTHUR written over and over in the damascus barrels was made by V Bovy of NY for Chester A Arthur.

TR took an Ithaca Flues Grade 4, Fox F grade, and Winchester 1897 Repeater to Africa in 1909.
From Through The Brazilian Wildernesswritten by Theodore Roosevelt in 1914 "For arms the naturalists took 16-bore shotguns, one of Cherrie's having a rifle barrel underneath. The firearms for the rest of the party were supplied by Kermit and myself, including my Springfield rifle, Kermit's two Winchesters, a 405 and 30-40, the Fox 12-gauge shotgun, and another 16-gauge gun, and a couple of revolvers, a Colt and a Smith & Wesson."
His 16g 5E L.C. Smith SN 211,768 is on display at the Cody Firearms Museum.



More infro here http://www.picturetrail.com/sfx/album/view/19937467

Wilson in "Steel Canvas" pictures a E Thomas Jr (Chicago)
That was owned by TR
Reguards
Bill McPhail

Any details on that?