All of those records were either lost or thrown out. The best you can do is guess.

40 Rod

I've been building a database of Model 44s, drawing on online listings, a few from my own and others' collections.  I can now establish some date ranges based on features, but this is a poor substitute compared the the factory records that Westinghouse destroyed to prevent investigation of its' war profiteering during World War One.  

Here's the Chicopee City Historian's take on it.

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George Westinghouse was not a nice man.  What he did to Nicola Tesla ranks as one of the worst industrial crimes of the 19th century.

uscra112 wrote on Jul 14^th, 2016 at 1:48pm:


That "history of J. Stevens Arms written in 1942" is something I've never heard of--what could he be talking about?  A piece that appeared in a local newspaper, perhaps?  The most complete history of the company I've seen (thought it's only a few pages in length), considered apart from its products, is Kenneth Cope's, and his bibliography includes nothing written in 1942.

If Page owned the company free & clear, his buyout should have greatly exceeded one million...unless there was a heavy debt load.  How he, originally only the Secretary & Book-keeper, acquired the assets to buy out Stevens and the other partners has always mystified me; suppose he could have borrowed the money. 

Doesn't seem plausible that the Russian gov't would have "invested" 30 million in the Stevens plant.  If that was the value of the total contract, it would not have been paid in a single lump sum--especially by the penny-pinching Czarist gov't.  And of course the contract was never completed, nor were any arms, I don't think, actually delivered to the Russians.  (One place they did end up was in the hands of US soldiers assigned to stateside guard duties--I've seen somewhere a photo of one of them holding a M-N.)

One thing said in this piece that does make sense is that the records destroyed were those for wartime production.  I'm a little hesitant, however, to place enormous confidence in an account written by someone who calls a M-N a "field-piece."

Very Interesting:
Quote:

uscra112 wrote on Jul 14^th, 2016 at 9:37pm:


I don't and I'm not going to buy it to read that page, but if you have Kenneth Cope's handgun & pocket-rifle book, I'd like to know how the two compare, and if they differ on any significant points.