Sweet Elsie's Ageless Charm

She's getting a bit long in the tooth, but she still can charm your socks off. Just ask six or seven generations of American shooters-more, if you count her incarnation as a hammergun. But she is neither best known nor best loved as a quaint old gal with big ears. In her classic form she is sleek and sexy. In that form she is by name Lyman's lady, but at heart she's Alexander's ragtime girl. And oh, can she woo. In the late 1870s Lyman Cornelius Smith was a young man determined to make his way in the business world.In September 1877 he and his brother, Leroy, formed a partnership with gunmaker William Baker to manufacture Baker-designed guns and rifles in Syracuse, New York. Baker and Leroy Smith sold their interest in W.H. Baker & Co. to Lyman around 1880 and went off to Ithaca to help found the Ithaca Gun Co. Lyman continued building Baker guns for a while, but a rapidly changing market demanded something new. Smith got that something new from Alexander T. Brown, one of his factory machinists who owned a gift for mechanical design. From a patent Brown received in March 1883 came the L.C. Smith hammerless gun. Brown gave Smith a key to the future. Breechloaders were relatively new in the 1880s; hammerless breechloaders were the cutting edge. Each concept posed specific mechanical problems. For the breechloader, it was how to fasten the break-open action; for the hammerless gun, it was how to cock the locks. Experimentation was rife on both sides of the Atlantic. Purdey's double-bite underbolt, patented in 1863, would become a world standard, but some makers preferred the notion of fastening an action at the top. With their 1875 patent, Anson and Deeley demonstrated beyond question that leverage from barrels rotating on a hinge is the most efficient means of cocking hammerless lockwork. Alexander Brown sided with those who liked the top fastener. His version amounts to a steel cylinder that rotates on an axis parallel to the bores. A deep notch milled into the cylinder forms the actual hook, which engages a slot in the rib extension. The cylinder also engages a lip on the extension, creating a double bite. It's simple, efficient and, if the engagements are prop-erly fitted, remarkably strong. Hunter Arms Co., which later manufactured the guns, made an advertising point of insisting that an L.C. Smith "never shoots loose." I'm inclined to believe it. I've owned sev-eral Smiths, shot quite a few more, and never saw a problem with the fastener. More to the point, I have a photo of a Smith with its left-hand chamber blown out-not just cracked or peeled but literally blown away from the breech to the forcing cone, from the rib to the barrel flat. There had to be some sort of obstruction that created enough pressure to shatter the thickest part of the barrel, but the interesting thing is that the fastener appears unaffected. You can see it clearly: The action is closed, the cylinder has rotated, and the hook is snuggled right into place in the extension. I guess you could call it a do-it-yourself cutaway, but whatever you call it, it's impressive. Not surprisingly, some other American makers-notably Dan Lefever and Ansley Fox-copied Brown's fastener. It's also no surprise that no one copied his cocking system, even though it's mechanically sound and quite reliable. Gunmakers have devised all kinds of ways to transfer barrel leverage from the forend iron to the locks. Most have chosen levers or slides, hooks or pushrods. Alexander Brown chose torque. On the end of an L.C. Smith action knuckle you'll find two little levers that look like cranks, which is exactly what they are. These fit a recess in the forend iron, and as the barrels drop down the cranks rotate cocking rods that run through the action bar and engage the hammers. The concept is elegantly simple, even if manufacture wasn't. I suspect other makers shied away because levers and slides are easier-and cheaper-to make than Brown's cocking pieces. No matter. That's how Elsie arms herself and does so without fail, time after time. Find a Smith with a cocking problem, and it's most likely to lie with the lock rather than the cocking system. I could take Alexander Brown somewhat to task over the design of his lock and more so for his toplever spindle, but just now I'd rather not. Sweet Elsie is not perfect-but she's still Sweet Elsie, after all. Although the hammerless gun was an immediate success, Lyman Smith had no intention of spending his life as a gun manufacturer. With dollar signs in his eyes and a shrewd mind behind them, he decided that typewriters were the coming things and started manufacturing them in 1886. Alexander Brown was intrigued by the contraption as well; who do you reckon invented the first machine capable of printing both upper- and lower-case type? The L.C. Smith gun works went up for sale and found ready buyers in John Hunter and his brother, Tom, of Fulton, New York. John Hunter had six sons, who he felt needed something to do; he decided they should be gunmakers. Shades of Charles Parker. The Hunter Arms Co. incorporated February 12, 1890, built a new factory in Fulton, and moved the machinery and everything else, including most of the skilled employees, up from Syracuse. Guns built after this time bear the Hunter Arms mark on their ribs, but the marque remained "L.C. Smith." Elsie was already that famous. And she remained relatively unchanged during the first 20-odd years of Hunter Arms manufacture, kept the graceful curves and planes in the sculpting of her frame and lockplates. In the highest of her 11 grades she was fitted with lovely European wood and gussied with exceptionally good engraving. All this combined to make her the most beautiful American gun of the time. But times change. The political and economic upheavals that bedeviled the world in the early 1910s put a hurt on the entire American arms industry, and if the Hunters were to hold their place in the market, something had to change. Reducing production costs was an obvious move, so in 1913 Elsie evolved to a new form. The intricate-and expensive-machining and filing and polishing that was the bulwark of her beauty had to go in favor of operations that were simpler, faster and thus cheaper. She would not have survived otherwise. From then on her lines were simpler and less graceful-not so much overall as in detail-but certainly more economical in milling and machining. She lost a measure of her beauty but none of her charm, and she endured, even as the world was falling to pieces around her, in some ways literally. Much of the Hunter Arms machinery was growing obsolete, and the factory was sinking into disrepair. World War I dealt a heavy blow to the sporting-arms industry in general. In 1920 the Hunters sold the company to industrialist Gifford Simonds. The 1920s were a bit brighter, the Depression of the '30s disastrous. The Simonds family, who never showed much interest in Hunter Arms anyway, sold the company to their former employee Stephen Gilles, who had been running the operation almost single-handedly. Ill health forced Gilles into semi-retirement in 1937, and by 1939 Elsie was looking for a new sugar daddy. In 1941 both Harrington & Richardson and Marlin took a look. H&R bowed out; Marlin held out for a better price. In the face of government demands for refund of money advanced during WWII, Hunter Arms filed bankruptcy papers in April 1945. Marlin bought the business in October and renamed it L.C. Smith Gun Co. Fortunes improved for a while, including reintroduction of a couple of Elsie grades that had been discontinued years before. It was not to last. On a cold January night in 1949 part of the factory's main floor collapsed, dumping milling machines and other equipment into a raceway under the building. Marlin surveyed the wreckage and decided to cut its losses, finish guns already well into production, and then call it a day. Elsie took her last curtain call in a catalog issued in 1950. Gone but far from forgotten. Those who knew her in her glory days mourned and pined for yet another encore. And to nearly everyone's surprise, she got it. In 1967 Marlin reintroduced the L.C. Smith as a 12-bore available in two grades, Field and Deluxe Field, priced at $350 and $400 respectively. It was not the gun for the time. An underwhelmed market forced Marlin to discontinue it in 1972. So gone again, and this time not likely to reappear in her original form. But the affection in which American shooters have held her for so long has not faded but indeed grown more ardent over time. During the past few years a resurgence of interest in Elsie has led to formation of the L.C. Smith Collectors Association-for anyone who has an interest in Smith guns and wants to share knowledge of an American classic. It also has resulted in a magnificent new book. In L.C. Smith-"The Legend Lives" (see "The L.C. Smith Legend Lives On," Gazette, May/June) John Houchins has produced a splendid volume of nearly 700 pages that covers every aspect of Smith history and production. The photography by Terry Allen is spectacular-every image except archival photos printed in full color and, often as not, full-page. At a trim size of 81/2" x 11", you could paper a fair-sized room with them. Better, though, to leave them between the covers so you can hold it all in your lap and turn pages and be captivated by what you find. Like an aging diva, Sweet Elsie is an enchantress, and if, unlike Cleopatra, her variety is not infinite, it comes close enough. Spend an hour or two with Houchins' book and you'll see that I wasn't exaggerating at the beginning of this. Even if you've never held her in your hands or snuggled her stock against your cheek, Sweet Elsie will charm your socks right off. Editor's Note: Deluxe leather-bound copies of L.C. Smith-"The Legend Lives" from a second printing will be available this fall for $195 plus shipping. A book from the first-edition run of 2,500 cloth-bound hardcovers costs $125 plus shipping. For more information, contact The L.C. Smith Book, 422 N. Trade St., Winston-Salem, NC 27101; 800-235-8358; newlcsmithbook@bellsouth.net. Michael McIntosh is Shooting Sportsman's Shooting Editor.