Grandma's Gun and Her Sister

[Dave Noreen]

Just cleaning out some boxes and found this picture from a long ago road trip with 16 O-frame. A meeting and comparison of two early GH-Grade Damascus barrel 28-gauges.

[Bill Murphy]

What neat guns they must be.

[Dean Romig]

Terrific round knob twins! Looks like 26" in Kevin's hands and 28" in the other fellow's. Who is the other gent and where, pray tell, are those guns today? :cool:

[Kevin McCormack]

OMG! - I feel another road trip coming on!! The records say there is another AH Damascus 16 ga. 0 frame 26" 5 3/4-pounder out there somewhere. Using the 28 ga. Damascus paradigm explored above, it's probably within 150 miles of here.

What a great trip that was - then to discover ANOTHER 28 ga. Damascus gun not 2 hours in the opposite direction!! What are the chances - 3 Dam 28s, all G grades, within 200 miles of one another - and within 6 SN digits of one another!!! Reasearcher, "Thanks for The Memories!

PS - I know where all 3 are now, resting peacefully beyond the reach of the unworthy and the hoarders. We will see and enjoy them again, I can assure you. For now, its time to go wax the stock on my H&H Royal Grade.

[Dean Romig]

You're an awful tease Kevin!! ... but you know that :rolleyes:

[Bill Murphy]

Grandma's gun came from the William Wagner store in D.C. I assume the other two did too. Most Wagner guns are found within a short distance of where they were originally bought. Anyone else out there have a Wagner gun?

[Harry Collins]

Bill,

You told me my early 28 gauge VH came from Wagner's. I found it at a gun show in Louisville. The fellow I purchased it from was a dealer out of Georgia as I remember.

Harry

[Jeff Kuss]

Bill .
As you know, my 8 ga. hammergun is lettered to Wagner's store. I just bought a 10 ga gh on a 6 frame with 34" barrels. I would guess that it may have been a Chesapeake Bay gun, but here are no records available. I bought it out of Tennessee.

Jeff

[C Roger Giles]

What I want to know is, in the picture which one is the Grandma and which one is the Sister, both have a look that has no way of being described easily.

Sunday afternoon and bored, PTG Rog

[Kevin McCormack]

Rog; I am holding Grandma's Gun on the left and our friend is holding the Sister Gun on the right. In the background are the beautiful Allegheny mountains and the routine, mundane and boring rest stop parking lot area - a great place to meet for Show & Tell!

[Bill Murphy]

Jeff, has the second gun of your pair been located? I first located the pair of Wagner 8 gauges when we copied the records in 1998. I made a copy of the order and vowed to find those guns some day.

[Jeff Kuss]

Bill,
I don't know where the G 8 ga. is located. I have not looked for it very hard either.
Jeff

[Kevin McCormack]

OK, guys - just to keep your antennae up - there are a pair of PHE 28 ga. fluid steel barreled guns that came through Wm. Wagner's store. The pair are consecutively numbered and currently live on the Eastern Shore of MD. Babe and his father ran them through the old shop on 5th Ave. in Ilion in the early 1960s. To my knowledge no one has seen them since, but we are still looking.

[Eric Eis]

Ok Francis What the Hell are you Talking about :cuss:!!!!!

[Dave Suponski]

Anyway.....Dave,Thanks for posting that great picture of Kevin and yourself and a couple of great Parker's.

Bill,Was Wagners a high volume Parker dealer in their day?

[Bill Murphy]

Francis, Mr. Wagner's first name was mentioned in my first post. Dave, yes, William Wagner was not only a very high volume Parker dealer, he was the original promoter of 28 gauge guns in the earliest years of their production. If you will refer to your great Parker Pages article about the earliest 28 gauges, you will find that Wagner ordered some of the first. My little quail gun is the seventh 28 gauge ordered, and it came from William Wagner's store. Mr. McCormack and I have a definitive body of research about Wagner's early orders, but we have been denied access by the PGCA BOD to a couple of order book copies which would allow us to complete our research. By the way, the PP article on early 28 gauges was completed without any assistance from the BOD although we could have used it. Oh well.

[Dave Suponski]

Bill, Very interesting info. Thank You. Are there any photos of Wagner's store around anywhere? I would have to think Wagner's location to the Chesapeake Bay region had to at least account for some of volume of gun sales.What era do we need info for to complete your research?

[Bill Murphy]

Dave, I brought up pictures of Wagner's storefront on the computer, don't remember the site. Kevin has visited the store, but I have not. I assume he also has pictures. It exists today with modern style tenants, no gun stores in Southeast D.C. any more. There is a quiver full of explanation for Uncle Billy Wagner's participation in the advent of smallbore popularity in Parker history. Proximity to the Eastern Shore, as Dave suggests, is one of them. However, William Wagner was in the middle of shotgun competition at the turn of the century and before and after. He was a high average trap shooter and surviving shooting papers document his participation in big shoots, including the Grand American. He was the A.W. DuBray of the Washington area, promoting Parkers at shoots on a regular basis. His success in the selling of Parker shotguns resulted in the gifting, from Parker Brothers, of a AAH Pigeon Gun. His discount structure in the order books is as good or better than Shoverling Daly and Gales, Tryon, and other big wholesale houses. He not only sold many 20 and 28 gauge guns, his orders include significant numbers of safetyless pigeon guns, including John Phillip Sousa's AAH safetyless 12 bore. By the way, "Uncle Billy" is not a loosely applied title by his researchers. He was referred to as "Uncle Billy" by the early writers in the gun papers that recorded shooting results. He was a prolific hunter of the Potomac River and Southern Maryland. His ability to sell the 28 gauge Parker when no one else was doing it had much to do with his proximity to the U.S. Capitol, just a short walk from his shop. The House and Senate must have been a real money tree to Wagner and helped to spread the little Parkers to all corners of the country.

[Eric Eis]

Bill what Parker Pages article are you refering to on the 28 ga, I must have missed it and would like to read it.

[Dean Romig]

Bill, Thank you very much for your enlightening and informative post.

- save & print -

[Robin Lewis]

Look in the 2009 issue 2 for the article "Early 28 Gauge Parkers" on page 49.

To find this I went to "parkerguns.org" then to "Parker Pages" and clicked on the "Parker Pages Index" and searched ("ctrl f" to get search box) for "early 28" and there it is.

[Dave Suponski]

Bill, Thank you so much for the additional info. Now I kinda wish we had this conversation while I was putting the article together. The article was born out of the "What was the earliest 28 gauge serial numbers" if I remember right. But I think an article on "Uncle Billy" would be well recieved. Are you and Kevin working on anything? If I can be of help just ask...

[Bill Murphy]

For those of you who use google earth and other streetscape research tools, Uncle Billys store was established in 1877 and was, and is, at 207 1/2 Pennsylvania Avenue, S.E. Washington, D.C. A short description of the Wagner business is included in "Historical Sketches of the Capital City of our Country" an 1878 book by John P. Coffin.

[Bill Murphy]

I googled "william wagner historical sketches john coffin" and got the page reference to the long paragraph describing Wagner's business. By the way, Peter Johnson described a business on Pennsylvania Avenue on Capitol Hill in his book, but did not describe Wagner Hardware by name. I would be interested to know whom Johnson interviewed to come up with that obscure piece of information. The Parker records were not available to him and only a very few William Wagner orders included his street address.

[Dave Noreen]

The other gent in the picture with Kevin is not me, I was taking the picture. The guy with the other gun was from the Burgh.

Dave