marlinguy wrote on Oct 7^th, 2019 at 5:03pm:


Right.  I fully agree. That was why I wrote the disclaimer.

On the other hand, I was impressed that as a writer interested in historic Denver, as broad and full of subject mater as this frontier town was, and assuming the writer is not likely to know which end of a singleshot to hold in their shoulder, was interested enough to include some of this in the building description, even though it looks like it was hastily recorded. 

The average reader of this would never care.   I am glad we do!

Peterson never had a shop in Mt. Dora, Florida. The contents of Peterson's shop were purchased and moved there by the buyer. It is maintained as a sort of Peterson museum, and used to attract customers to the shop.

Since the article notes that the shop's contents were only purchased and moved after Roy Peterson died in 1947, the first part of your statement is clearly true, Vall.  As for the Florida shop only being "some sort of museum", my "Peterson" ad cover was cancelled on 01/06/1968 and was hand-addressed to the Colt Firearms Company.  So perhaps up until some 50 years ago, even if guns were not being smithed there, perhaps they were still being sold.

Bill Lawrence

Yes, the AW Peterson "museum" in Mt. Dora is and always was a gun shop. But the museum part is an area to itself, and as I mentioned it is set there to attract customers to the shop. It wouldn't be much of an an attraction for customers if they didn't have the gun shop there to sell guns and services. But it was never Peterson's shop; just the contents of his shop.
It's really great that the entire shop has been kept as intact as it is. Baker had a lot of foresight that others didn't to maintain the Peterson shop so well.

In the mid-seventies, I passed by the Peterson shop in Florida quite frequently, travelling from Cocoa Beach up to Ocala. 

I never failed to stop if they were open, and never grew tired of looking at the old Axel Peterson tooling displayed there. I was a kid, and didn't know much about schuetzen shooting or rifles, but the quality of the rifles on display was quite mesmerizing. 

The rest of the shop was always worth a look, but it was the old stuff which kept me coming back.