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By Root 1952 0

soon found that, owing to the Quakers’ pacifist dislike of their trade, they were unwelcome in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. So they departed to found communities in southeastern Pennsylvania, the most famous being Lancaster, established in 1718 about seventy miles west of the capital. Lancaster didn’t have much to see—at first, it was just a trading post and several log cabins—but the surrounding area was blessed with seams of iron ore and tracts of maple and walnut trees, which the gun-smiths adopted as their favored materials for stocks. Moreover, the location was perfect: it was within reasonable traveling distance of Philadelphia, yet it also formed the gateway to the boundless wilderness beyond, ensuring a steady supply of rangers, trappers, explorers, and hunters needing well-crafted, reliable, accurate weapons.

Expansion was rapid as immigrants rushed to this new economic hot spot. In 1719 the Swiss-German Martin Meylan built a workshop to bore out gun barrels; two years later Peter Leman was making rifles at Leman Place, a village a few miles east of Lancaster. To serve gun buyers and the burgeoning population, taverns, stores, and inns sprang up along the winding trails linking the isolated settlements, as did posts providing frames for hunters to stretch and dry their deer, bear, wolf, and panther skins. By 1730 guns were the area’s most lucrative business, and men with names like Roesser, Stenzel, Albrecht, and Folecht were making a good living manufacturing rifles. In 1815 no fewer than sixty gunsmiths, each with his own particular style and specialty, lived in Lancaster County alone.57

Between their arrival and the outbreak of the Revolution, these gun-makers created the very epitome of a firearm: the “Kentucky rifle.” One theory surrounding the origin of its name is that in the early 1770s stories were circulating of Daniel Boone’s distant explorations west of the Cumberland Mountains. At the time any territory there was generally referred to as “Kentucky” (today, the area making up the states of Kentucky and Tennessee), and because Boone carried a rifle made in Pennsylvania (“Pennsylvania rifle” never really caught on) out there, well, why not use “Kentucky rifle” to describe the typical firearm carried on the frontier? A second explanation traces the name to a song popularized after Andrew Jackson’s victory over the British at New Orleans during the War of 1812. The lyrics to “The Hunters of Kentucky” contain the first use in print of the name “Kentucky rifle.” It’s equally possible, however, that the term was commonly used in speech for many decades prior to the battle but that no one thought to write it down.58

For several years after establishing themselves in Lancaster, gun-smiths restricted themselves to turning out run-of-the-mill Jäger rifles, the sort they had long been accustomed to making and their customers to buying. From about 1725, however, they gradually introduced a raft of changes that, taken together, spurred the relatively primitive Jäger to evolve into the distinct, if genetically similar, Kentucky.59 The two most striking mutations were in length and caliber.

An early engraving of sixteenth-century German hunters in the wilderness. Immigrant gunsmiths from central Europe brought their specialist knowledge of rifle design to the New World.

Whereas the average barrel length of a German rifle was between 30 and 36 inches, American ones grew to between 40 and 48 inches.60The extension allowed a more efficient combustion of the powder, thereby reducing fouling and maximizing the force propelling the ball from the muzzle. It also quieted the rifle’s report and served to balance the weapon for improved handling. Aesthetically speaking, as the physical forces were more evenly distributed, gunsmiths could lighten the weight of the barrel so as to fashion a weapon more graceful and slender than the Jäger.

A key ancillary effect of the longer Kentucky barrel was the reduction of caliber. Jäger bores, and those of many smoothbore muskets, averaged .65 of an inch (and there were