    
Development of the American Longrifle: A Summary by Tom Hall On Saturday, September 16, the Friends of Arrow Rock were privileged to have Wallace Gusler, master gunsmith of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, as our lead speaker for the "Gunstocks and Bustles" program. Mr. Gusler has been an invaluable informal longdistance advisor and has provided helpful encouragement in both of the two restorations of the John P.Sites, Jr. gunsmith shop (1844-1904) in Arrow Rock, first in the late 1960's, and second, after problems with moisture in the building required a second restoration, during 1989-1991. Since he first came to Willliamsburg from his home near Salem, Virginia in 1962, Wallace Gusler and his journeymen and apprentice gunsmiths at the Revolutionary-period gunshop in Williamsburg have been engaged in researching the 18th-century documents and techniques needed to recreate the art and trade of making colonial-period longrifles from the basic raw materials, "lock, stock and barrel". These processes had largely become lost arts following the introduction of mass-produced breechloading firearms about the time of the Civil War. While doing this research, Mr. Gusler has brought to light important information on the origins of the American longrifle and what he refers to as the "Great Wagon Road culture" of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, which produced these guns. Directly relevant to Arrow Rock is the part the Sites family of gunsmiths of Virginia and Missouri played in creating these historic weapons. While he was still a boy, Wallace Gusler first became interested in historic gunsmithing partly through meeting and visiting the gunshop of Howard Sites of Covington, Virginia, who died in 1981. Howard was apparently the last of the Sites gunsmiths, in a line going back to George Sites (1767- ca. 1850) of Harrisonburg in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, great uncle of Arrow Rock's John P.Sites, Jr. This was new information to those of us involved in restoring Arrow Rock's Sites gunshop, since we had assumed that the Sites line of gunsmiths ended with the death of J.P. Sites, Jr. in Arrow Rock in 1904, and of his half-brother Chester Sites in Clifton, Cooper County, Missouri, in 1899. Mr. Gusler spent several hours during both days of our program in Arrow Rock at the Sites gunshop, generously advising us on ways to improve our interpretation of an 1850's-period gunsmith shop, and answering questions from visitors, some of whom brought historic firearms for him to examine. He said that when he walked into the Sites shop, which he had never seen (he had never visited Missouri outside of St. Louis), he had a surprising feeling of having been in the shop before. This was because the general layout of the space in the first floor of the building, which the Friends have restored as a working frontier gunshop, ca. 1850, reminded him very strongly of the long narrow shape of Howard Sites gunshop in Covington, Virginia, in the 1950's. He suggested that we hang guns from the ceiling joists of the shop, a space-saving practice which has been documented in Virginia gunshops of the late 1700's, and which Howard Sites continued in his gunshop; this might have been a traditional practice of the Sites family of gunsmiths. Mr. Gusler also visited the home of John and Nancy Sites, restored by the Friends; he confirmed that to his knowledge, the Sites shop is the only historic gunsmith shop restoration in the the country in the original (not reconstructed) building, and that the combination of the gunsmith's shop and house, as museum displays, is also unique. He joined the crowd viewing the Friends' new "living history" first-person interpretation of "Uncle Johnny" Sites, as portrayed by Lloyd French, at the gunshop. He examined the Christopher Collection of Early Missouri Firearms at the Friend's office building, and he was complimentary of the Friends preservation, restoration, and interpretation work in all of these projects. He was particularly admiring of two of the firearms in the Friends' small collection of weapons made by Sites gunsmiths, and he plans to have them professionally photographed, with the Friends' permission, to be included in his chapter on the Sites family of gunsmiths in his nearly-completed 700-page, two-volume book on Virginia gunsmiths and their work. A small part of the many years of research he has done for this book provided the basis for Mr. Gusler's fascinating talk, illustrated with beautiful slides of historic firearms, on the first day of our program. The American flintlock long rifle, sometimes called the Pennsylvania rifle, from the then-colony where it was first made, or the Kentucky rifle, from the state where it later found its most famous use in the hands of Daniel Boone and others, could just as appropriately be called the Virginia rifle, or the Shenandoah Valley rifle. It was the product of a unique culture of the late 18th century, crossing the Mason-Dixon line and extending the length of the Great Wagon Road, America's first major interior pathway of westward expansion, some 430 miles from Philadelphia, through the western panhandle of Maryland, crossing the Potomac River at Harper's Ferry, and down the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, in a generally southwesterly direction. First leading to the Yadkin River valley of North Carolina, this road was eventually extended in the 1790's to the Cumberland Gap, carrying pioneers on across the Appalachian Mountains into Kentucky. The first settlers of this backcountry area between the Blue Ridge mountains and the main chain of the Appalachians, were foreigners, Scotch-Irish and Germans, imported from Europe as part of a plan to provide a protective buffer between the Indians along the western frontier, and the more-settled areas of the Piedmont and Tidewater, in eastern Virginia. This plan was the creative idea of early 18th-century Virginia colonial governor Alexander Spotswood, whose Palace and Capitol have both been beautifully restored in Colonial Williamsburg. The Sites family of gunsmiths, whose emigrant ancestor from the Palatine region of Germany, Johann Peter Seitz, landed in Philadelphia about 1717, was part of this pioneer movement. Although they may have been first made as early as the 1740's, the first documentation of significant use of American-made longrifles was in 1758 when American colonial troops under British general John Forbes were instrumental in capturing Fort Duquesne, at the site of present-day Pittsburg, from the French and their Indian allies. The Indians told the French that they would not return for a second attempt to hold the fort, because "The Americans know how to fight." This was the beginning of the mystique and historic reputation of the American longrifle and the riflemen who knew how to use it, in fighting the Indians along the frontier, the French at Fort Duquesne, and later the British at the Revolutionary battles of King's Mountain and Cowpens, and finally, at New Orleans in 1815. These rifles were made in multiple well-differentiated individual styles, by proud, highly-trained professional gunsmiths in small shops along the Great Wagon Road, from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and on to Fincastle, Botetourt County, Virginia, where John P. Sites, Sr. (1784-1853) worked as a gunsmith before moving to Missouri in 1834. The tradition of the master gunsmiths of the Shenandoah Valley, whose work has been so carefully catalogued by Wallace Gusler, with numerous outstanding examples shown by him in his talk, was thus the direct ancestor of the work of John P. Sites, Jr. of Arrow Rock. Like his forebears, Sites located his shop directly on a main route of westward expansion, in his case, the Santa Fe Trail. Like them, he was conservative in his methods and proud of his work, stamping his name on his gun barrels, as had his father before him. His work, his shop and his house survive, and as Wallace Gusler has done so successfully and thoroughly at Colonial Williamsburg, the Friends of Arrow Rock are determined, although obviously on a much smaller scale, to preserve the tradition of the early American gunsmith on the later frontier of the Boonslick district of central Missouri, in Arrow Rock. Friends of Arrow Rock |
