Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill Murphy
Bill Mullins, the 40" 16 gauge G grade came out of Shenandoah Guns in Berryville, VA. Judging from the time it was there, decades ago, it probably came from the General Billy Mitchell estate, which the shop was selling off at the time. If it was in fact the same gun, the barrels were Vulcan steel. Ben Toxvard would not sell me the gun, but a few years later, he relented and sold me his Curtis try gun, which was owned by Colonel Townsend Whelen.
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I was told Whelen had an intrest in that shop as more of a silent partner . A few years ago I met an older fellow in Culpeper that was big into single shot rifles . His two favorite cartridges were the Hornet and the R2 Lovell . He had a really awesome 03 Springfield in the Lovell cartridge I tried and tried to get as R F Sedgley had built the gun but I digress . The fellow at the time had an 1878 Sharps that was in 22 Blue Streak , if I’m not mistaken that was a 22 HiPower with refinements and necked back from .228 to .224 anyway he said he got it at Shenandoah Gunworks and it was a Whelen owned gun . He wouldn’t sell that one either , it was kinda neat in that it came with a period wooden tool box filled with loading tools for that gun . But then of the 40-50 guns of this type he owned I’d say over half of them had been purchased with period loading tools . The gentleman is gone now and I never got a gun from him but I did buy all his bullet molds . In his molds were a couple Ideal adjustable Perfection molds , I sold one of them right away and covered my cost with a few dollars left over . He had thirty or forty sealed G&H boxes of 22-3000 new primed brass , but it was so old it had gotten brittle but it still would’ve been of use to a cartridge collector .