So the story starts - my wife wants to find an antique dining room table so off we go antique-ing on a Saturday,
We stop in a little antique store in a podunk town about 20 miles from the house and off to the right I see approx 60
Brown Bess's and an 2 old sharps (one a carbine from 1863) lining the wall.
She heads left to the antique furniture - I immediately bang a right , meet a guy who has one of the flintlocks on his work bench in a side room , I say nice collection - do you build these (thinking they are replicas) he responds no these are all original . I'm just fixing them up.
Then the gunsmith fills me in.
Apparently these are from a collection recovered from a Nepalese armory in 2003 ..he said there are thousands and he is one of the gunsmiths hired to repair them, ensure their internal workings, repair original stocks, and keep them as close to original as humanly possible. The majority are housed somewhere in NJ. The ones he allowed me to handle that had been shipped to him to work on had dates of 1776 -1777, 1778, 1779 ..and I held the little sharps carbine, man that was awesome. He also told me they recovered Bronze cannons , original flints , numerous knives , original balls etc..
Unbelievable Guy's - I actually held an original Brown bess from 1776 in my hand.
the gunsmith and I spoke for about an hour while my wife looked at the antique furniture.. There were some flintlocks that had some sort of modifications (I'm not flintlock literate) from the original flintlock ..to..a cap ..and then some sort of pan type configuration. I could have stayed there for hours longer, but the better half was ready to leave.
She never did find her table and thought her antique-ing day was a bust , for me it was the best furniture shopping Saturday I ever had.
