As more fur trading posts were established and more settlers arrived, the demand for gunsmiths grew. Not just among settlers, but among the Indians as well. In the spring of 1751, Benjamin Franklinurged passage of a proposal “encouraging a number of sober discreet smiths to reside among the Indians.” In 1726, a Penobscot chief lobbied governor Dummer for the establishment of a trading post with a gunsmith at the mouth of the St. Georges River.
     British colonial policy regarding firearms and Indian affairs was contradictory, at best. The colonies needed the revenue from the Indian fur trade, so they supported the use of guns by the Indians. At the same time, they restricted the sale of guns to the Indians and in periods of conflict, they confiscated their guns. Teaching Indians to repair their own guns was prohibited, but gunsmiths were sent to trading posts specifically to maintain the Indians’ guns. The French had few restrictions on the sale of guns, and as a result, by the 1650’s, northeast Indians were well armed, in fact, by then, dependent on firearms.
     The Massachusetts Bay General Court, in 1700, ordered a smith be stationed at the new fort at Falmouth, Maine, “to mend the hatchets and firearms of the Indians at a reasonable price.” The old fort had been burned by the Indians in 1690.
     Compared to the Native Americans’ bow and arrow, firearms were the weapons of mass destruction of their day. A small breech-loaded swivel cannon of the early 1600’s, on Richmond Island, Casco Bay, in 1632 was commonly referred to as the “murderer”. Leveling the playing field some, was the Indian skill in military strategy. Colonists learned this from them and used it to great advantage against the British regular army during the American revolution.

Hiram Leonard of Bangor, Maine, in hunting garb holding an over and under rifle (probably a “Four shooter”) and carrying a knife at his chest and an axe in his belt. Photo taken in the 1860’s. Photo courtesy Merritt Hawes.

Twin brothers Andrew and Thomas Jefferson Peavey’s 1866 patent drawing for this .22 caliber short pocket knife pistol didn’t explain exactly how it operated. They have a blade as well as a hammer released by a trigger that extends downward from the handle. The South Montville brothers produced these and later Andrew made a pocket pistol revolver he called the “Little All Right”. Photo Courtesy Roger Peterson.

Guns from Wild, Wild East
     For most of the 1800’s Portland, Maine’s largest city, had many gunsmiths, but Bangor had more gun makers. Gunsmiths had set up shop there in the 1770’s with the establishment of a trading post at Treats Falls. Bangor in the 1830’s and 1840’s was known everywhere “as the lumber capitol of the world”. It was a rough, bustling river town renowned for its bars, and brothels. Millions of board feet of lumber poured down the Penobscot every spring to waiting lumber ships. There were a lot of hunters and trappers in the woods north of Bangor. But it was the commercial surge created by the lumber business, that was something to write home about. Woodcutters and river-drivers, after a winter in the woods roared into Bangor to spend their earnings, as fast and madly as possible. Bangor was the wild, wild east at mid-century.
     This boom town, awash in the cash woodsmen poured into it, streets, bars and hotels filled with sailors from around the world, became a niche market for a single-shot pistol. The saw-handle, underhammer, percussion boot pistols were a Bangor design. Rivermen liked them because they could be slipped into their boot. William Neal’s style of saw-handle grip was used on many of these simple, inexpensive guns. There was also a demand for a range of guns from ornate presentation pieces to sharpshooters, which were made by several gunmakers.
     If there is a character in the history of Maine gunmaking whose story stood above the high quality of his work, it would have to be Hiram L. Leonard. Born in Sebec, Maine in 1831, he was known as a skilled hunter at an early age. He was soon a famed big-game hunter who supplied lumber camps with moose. Leonard’s exploits as a hunter — a great shot, a man of legendary strength and endurance, a hunter’s hunter to the Indians — might have been reputation enough. But Leonard was also a highly-regarded gunmaker and inventor. He apprenticed with one of Bangor’s best gunmakers, C.V. Ramsdell, making some unique and good-looking guns. Added to this, his other interests and activities included trapping, dagguerotype, salmon hatchery operation, and taxidermy. Apart from all this, he was in fact, best known and most remembered for, the extraordinary split bamboo fly-fishing rods he made, ultimately with several employees.
     Henry Thoreau, on one of his three trips to the Maine woods in the mid 1800’s happened to share a stage coach with Leonard between Bangor and Monson. In his book The Maine Woods Thoreau describes Leonard in the coach crowded with hunters, as “…of good height, but not apparently robust, of gentlemanly address and faultless toilet; as you might meet on Broadway. He had a fair complexion, as if he had always lived in the shade, and with his quiet manners might have passed for a divinity student. I was surprised to find out he was probably the chief white hunter in Maine.” The encounter occurred when Leonard was on his way to a commercial hunting trip north of Monson. One of the many anecdotes about Leonard, not a very large man, has him carrying a quarter of moose meat, weighing 135 pounds, between two lakes, a distance of seven miles.
     Leonard’s involvement in gunsmithing is more the norm in Maine gunmaking history than the big manufacturing operations. There have been many gunsmiths who repaired firearms, and a few who made relatively small numbers of them.
     Currently, Saco Defense Inc. is a mass producer of military arms, which began as a cotton mill machine manufacturer in 1826. In the 1940’s, it started mass military production and, after changing ownership a few times, now produces machine guns and parts for them. Its introduction of quick change machine gun barrels may be their single most visible improvement. The ability to secure government contracts in a way the Evan’s brothers were not, at least in part, explains why they are here 125 years after the Evan’s Rifle Company threw in its hand.
     Another mass production machine gun company in Maine is Ordnance Technology, Inc., in Stetson, Maine. Mack Guinn started this company after leaving a company he operated in the 1970’s which developed and produced the Bushmaster rifle. Combining features of the AK-47 and the M-16, this automatic weapon poured out rounds, firing 600 rounds a minute. The days of firing a musket and reloading by cleaning hot embers out of the barrel with a ramrod, pouring in powder, wad and ball, ramming each down the barrel with a ramrod, to be ready to fire round two are long gone from the battlefield. The company has introduced a magazine for a light-weight machine gun, plastic frames, and in the field, quick change machine gun barrels to deal with overheating.
     The number of gunsmiths making and working on flintlock and percussion firearms is on the rise in Maine. Mass producers are making money, but it appears there may be more individual gunmakers, hand producing guns, in Maine. Black powder shoots and re-enactments are the biggest market for handmade muzzle-loaded firearms. The market of course can not compare to the military market, of course, but if the Aroostook War flares up again and they decide to fight it with period weapons, it could be the next big thing.
     These photographs appear in Dwight B Demeritt’s book Maine Made Guns and Their Makers 1973 and 1997, published by the Maine State Museum and available at Tilbury House Publishers, Augusta, Maine. The book is a well researched and written history of gun making in Maine. It is “the bible” on Maine made guns with a thick bibliography with 500 illustrations and photographs.