Arms, Armor and Militaria

.46 caliber. 33" octagonal barrel secured by a single wedge. NSN. Browned finish, brass furniture, German silver wedge escutcheon, pewter forend cap, walnut half-stock. Single shot percussion ignition muzzleloading sporting rifle. Percussion lock with double set triggers marked in two lines forward of the hammer, ALBRIGHT/ST. LOUIS, lock is unmarked on the interior. Top flat of barrel marked in two tiny lines behind the rear sight: T.J. ALBRIGHT/ST. LOUIS, with the lower line weak. Rifle with scroll shaped brass triggerguard with single finger extension, crescent brass buttplate, simple toe plate, dovetailed buckhorn rear sight and dovetailed Rocky Mountain German silver blade front sight. Two iron thimbles retain an old wooden ramrod. The rifle is from the collection of noted arms historian and author Charles Worman who co-authored the two volume set Firearms of the American West.

Thomas John (TJ) Albright (1808-1890) was a third generation Pennsylvania gunmaker, whose grandfather had been the Lancaster, PA master gunmaker Andrew Albright. TJ's father Henry Albright worked in PA and OH with the greater part of his time spent working in Nazareth, PA, where he died in 1845. Around 1842 TJ relocated to St. Louis where he worked as both a gunmaker and retailer. A large number of imported shotguns are known with his mark, with lesser quantities of his plains style rifles known. It appears that like the shotguns, many of the pistols that bear his mark were imported and simply retailer marked. Albright was a contemporary of the Hawkens, Dimick and a number of other famed St. Louis gunmakers and worked during the heyday of the plains rifle period in the 1840s and 1850s. A desirable St Louis maker to add to any collection of rifles from that era. This is an honest, used Albright rifle that helped to carve out the path for western expansion.