What did a rifle made in Virginia prior to 1750 look like?
The question about what a pre-1750 longrifle might look like goes WAY beyond Virginia. Documented American rifles made anywhere before 1760 are scarce and, if you toss out the ones with questionable documentation, signatures, or origin, they come down basically to a few parts found in archaeological sites, also sometimes of questionable, European or American, origin. Based on documents, we know that both short rifles and long rifles existed in the colonies prior to the 1740s but nailing down a few surviving examples would be a wonderful breakthrough in research.
Given the lack of pre-1750 examples, what does it mean when someone refers to a longrifle as “early?”
“Early” is another term that has different meanings depending on the context in which it is used. An early Tennessee rifle is very different in period from an early Lancaster rifle. For the sake of simplicity I will stick to how the term is generally used in reference to the subject of Virginia made longrifles.
An early style rifle usually means one that pre-dates the “Golden Age” rifles but using that definition simply replaces the first question with, “What is a Golden Age rifle?” For the answer to that I refer you to page 31 in the third chapter of Joe Kindig’s book Thoughts on the Kentucky Rifle in Its Golden Age (1960).
Rifles actually made before the Revolutionary War are certainly early, not to mention scarce, and most will agree that the term also applies to those made during and immediately after the war. If you agree with me on that loose definition of the term, any rifle made prior to ca. 1780-85 is an “early rifle.”
But there is more to the definition of an early style rifle than the year in which it was made. The previously mentioned chapter in Mr. Kindig’s book addresses many of the characteristics that define an early rifle””wide flat butt pieces, tapered and flared barrels, etc. Chapter 20 in Volume II of George Shumway,s Rifles of Colonial America (1980) looks more closely at the evolution of the art on longrifles with an eye toward the shift from baroque to rococo design elements. Both the form of the rifle and the art on it are part of what a collector refers to when he refers to a rifle as “early.”
For a modern builder who aspires to produce an early rifle, Virginia or otherwise, there is one simple rule for dating objects to keep in mind: no rifle can be earlier than the latest detail of its construction or decoration. Examples”” since “German silver” (a man made nickel-brass alloy) did not come into use until the end of the first quarter of the 19th century, a rifle with German silver mounts or inlays could not considered a historically correct 18th-century rifle. Likewise a Federal Eagle on an inlay or patch box dates the rifle to the mid-1780s or later. Those examples are simple and obvious. Learning to tell the difference between rococo and Neo-classical design elements requires more study but is every bit as important to doing historically correct work.
