Yep, we're intensly proud. I think there is more than just ruffled mountain feathers involved here, however. For example, is it fair to compare the "artistic" merit of a Gillespie made in 1830 to a Penn longrifle made in 1775? Wouldn't you agreee that by 1830 the piedmont NC builders and the Penn builders built mostly guady, over-decorated guns? Too many meaningless inlays, flashy brass patchboxes, and Grandma Moses engraving, all about as tasteful as a 58 Cadillac? Personally, I much prefer Shaker furniture and Southern Mountain or Hawkin guns to the Federal period, but that's a matter of taste. The point is that by the time the earliest surviving mountain rifles were built the beautiful guns of Haynes and Rupp were museum pieces, and many would agree that there was no real artistic merit in the flashy style which followed the golden age.
You assume that the first rifles built in the mountains followed the style of the rifles built in the Valley of Virginia or the NC piedmont or Western Penn, and you may very well be right, but there is no explanation why that style suddenly changed to a style which owes nothing to the rifles made in those places--a change occuring at about the same time in places which were widely seperated from one another and which almost certainly did not have much trade or intercourse with one another. Beans look an awful lot like Gillespies, and they share more with early Hawkins than they do with most rifles made in the East at the same time.
I think there is an interesting mystery in all this--my personal speculation is that the explanation is related to the fact that the Penn longrifle evolved from folks whose origins were mostly German, as did the Piedmont NC/Moravian style.
Regardless of the origins of the first gunsmiths in the mountains, their customers evolved mostly from the culture of Celts--Scots-Irish, lowland Scot, and English borderer, a culture with little interest in flashy decoration but a keen appreciation of the rifle as a tool of war and survival. My mountain grandfather would have considered carving and inlays downright effeminant, and I'll bet that's a product of Celtic roots.
