Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company
taking a look at a pair of rifles that are going to be
in their upcoming April of 2020 Premier Auction.
And these are both Barton Jenks (sort of) rolling block rifles.
They are single-shot breech loaders, and
what's interesting to me is partly the design,
because this is an interesting kind of a different take on
the rolling block system that we really always associate with Remington,
but I'm also interested in just the history of the guy who designed these.
Because Barton Jenks came out of a family that was absolutely rife with inventors.
In fact ... the first [ancestor] of his who moved to the New World was a guy by the name of
Joseph Jenks who got himself the very first patent issued in the American colonies for an improved sawmill.
His uncle was William Jenks who designed the Jenks "Mule Ear" carbine,
I have a video on that that I'll link at the end here if you're interested in it.
His father was Alfred Jenks who created a very successful business designing textile machinery
in Pennsylvania, specifically Bridesburg, Pennsylvania.
And in fact Barton Jenks' son, Llewellyn, would go on to be a pioneer in refrigeration technology, also inventing many things.
So, the set up here basically is that Barton and his father Alfred ran a company that manufactured textile machines.
So looms and machines for separating cotton, cotton gins, and machines for working with wool.
They didn't do the textile manufacturing themselves, they designed and built the machinery for other
individual producers to do the work.
And ... this was a very successful business, it was a manufacturing business,
it was located in Bridesburg, Pennsylvania, as I think I already mentioned.
And when the Civil War broke out, of course, like any good businessmen
they turned to arms manufacturing, or the potential for it.
They already had a factory set up to make, you know, heavy industry sort of machine tools,
and so they set up a rifle production line. They got a series of contracts with the Union government.
And they would supply more than 100,000 muskets to the Federal government, the Union Army.
You can tell these because they are marked Bridesburg, PA, on the lock.
This got Barton Jenks interested in firearms technology, and at the end of the war
he put his brain to work coming up with a new system for a breech-loading rifle.
And he would end up submitting the system to two separate trials,
one run by the US Federal government and one run by the state of New York looking for both
new breech-loading rifles and conversions of muzzleloaders into breech-loaders.
That was ... something that people wanted to do at this time period. And there was a lot of interest in like,
"How can we save money by taking these existing muzzleloaders we already have,
and converting them to this new breech-loading technology without having to pay for entirely new rifles."
So we'll talk about exactly what came of these in a minute. But first, let's take a look at Barton Jenks' idea.
So what's really cool is we actually have two different versions of Jenks' rifle here.
We have a Model of 1867 built from scratch as a Jenks rifle, and we have a Model of 1867 that is a conversion,
that took an existing muzzleloading musket and converted it into a Jenks breech-loader.
So because he'd had access to a legit literal rifle factory that was producing these things,
Jenks had plenty of spare Bridesburg musket parts to work with.
So you can see some of those even back on this gun.
And we have things like rear sight bases that are very similar,
a lot of the woodwork is identical, barrel bands are identical, that sort of thing.
But he was submitting these for trials for both conversions and standalone rifles.
So let's start by taking a look at the conversion, and then we'll take a look at the full-length rifle.
You might be wondering how did Jenks get a patent on the rolling block system when his 1867 design
(which by the way, he submitted a patent in 1866, it was granted in 1868,
he [built the rifles] while the patent was still pending in 1867, ... that's why they have that model designation),
but his system is not really the same mechanically as the Remington rolling block.
So what Remington did is have this clever system where the hammer itself acted as a lock to hold the breech block in place.
What Jenks did instead was create a system where the breech block is self-locking, and the hammer operates independently.
And the benefit you get from doing this is that the whole thing can be opened in one action
by pulling back on the breech block, which will re-cock the hammer in the same one motion.
With a Remington you have to first cock the hammer, ... that action unlocks the breech,
then you can open it, and then you can load a round in.
So in theory Jenks' system is going to be faster to actually use and more efficient.
So you open it. This is your extractor here, you'd put a cartridge on there.
This started out as a rimfire design, as you can see from the firing pin hole in the side of the breech block out there.
And that's because when these were first made the US military was looking for rimfire cartridges,
like they had the .56 Spencer and similar cartridges.
So once you put that in, you then close the breech block, and this you'll notice is a two-part design.
So there's a screw right here. The centrepiece of our breech block is the locking piece.
This outer piece is ... the breech face.
This moves up into position like that, and then our locking block in the centre here is going to lift up,
you can see it right there, it's going to lift up and wedge itself against the back part of the receiver.
Thus locking the breech block in place. You then have the hammer here with its firing pin tip.
And in this case, kind of like the Spencer, it's on the outside of the gun.
Now this example does not have a functional ... hammer spring, so I have to push it home manually,
but when you pull the trigger, this is going to go up, drop through the breech block and fire.
On this rimfire rifle we basically have no markings at all.
There are a couple little proof marks down here, but no Barton Jenks markings.
So to identify this you already have to know what it is you're looking at.
On the made from scratch version, Jenks was much more helpful to us and put his whole name
as well as what I assume is the location of manufacture at the time, Philadelphia, on the side of the gun.
And Model 1867 on the back of the receiver.
This version of the gun is in concept identical, however, instead of being built on an existing muzzleloader
where you cut ... the end of the barrel off and install this assembly and use the same stock,
this one has been built on its own brand new standalone receiver.
Which gives it a split stock, so you have a stock in the back and a fore-end in the front. Which is going to be a lot stronger
than the conversion system here where you've got a wood stock straddling the whole thing.
This one has also been converted to centrefire, which is interesting.
There is one little difference here that you can note, and that is the hammer on this model is protected.
It's sort of inside the breech block, so you can see the hammer operates in this slot.
This one actually has a mainspring, but it's pretty sticky. So that one's inside there,
where our conversion gun is exposed on the outside.
The system however is mechanically the same, so you can open the whole thing by pulling back on the one lever.
This one, unfortunately, has been poorly taken care of and there's some rust in there that
I hope the new owner will treat it better and clean that up.
But it's neat to look at the breech face here,
where you can see that it was originally cut with a hole for a rimfire firing pin.
that has been added to with a centrefire hammer and firing pin as well.
So the same basic system here, pushing the breech block forward, when we get to right about this point
the block itself and the locking lever are going to separate.
That's going to pull the breech block forward and off of the firing pin so that it can't fire before it's fully locked.
There the breech block is closed, and then
we can see the locking lever lift up,
lock the breech block in place.
And then when I pull the trigger
the firing pin can go forward and fire the cartridge.
As for the other elements on the rifles,
they're pretty much all taken from the original musket pattern that these guns were built off of.
So you can see two different but equally vintage style of sights.
This guy has three leaves for 100, 300 and 500 yards. This one actually has a sliding sight.
Our barrel bands are pretty similar. Although this one's held in place with a spring lever, where this one's just tensioned.
Front bands with sling swivels. This one's got some sort of old wire tag on it. But you got front bands.
And then you've got the nose caps and the front end of the rifle. The front sight's actually missing on the built from scratch example.
And the muzzle loader conversion is actually just a couple inches shorter than the built from scratch, and still has its front sight.
The fact that you've probably never heard of these rifles kind of gives away the outcome of the trials,
which was they didn't go anywhere. I unfortunately don't have the actual results from those trials
discussing this particular design, so I can't tell you exactly why it didn't go anywhere.
It could have been any number of things. It could have been cost. It could have been reliability.
There is some open space in these actions, especially the rimfire one,
and maybe that led to reliability issues or they thought it would.
Things like this there can always be simple durability issues
if parts on a trials rifle aren't heat treated correctly and they deform or break during the trial.
There's generally no consideration given for, "Well the design seems OK, but you didn't build it very well."
No, with trials like these (the US trial in 1870 was over 100 rifles,
the 1867 trial that this would have been in was probably not that much different),
so yeah, you only get one chance at it.
So neither trial found these to be substantially valuable enough to continue with.
And what's kind of interesting to me is that Jenks then pretty much just, as far as I can tell, kind of dropped the idea.
He wasn't wedded to the firearms industry, it had ... been a good thing to do during the war.
It was good for business, good for his country.
But after the war when these rifles didn't go anywhere he kind of moved on, and ended up finding himself
doing work in the mining industry designing some equipment for mining.
Ultimately, unfortunately for him, he also started speculating in the railroad industry and lost,
basically, his entire fortune in railroad speculation. And ended up living until 1896.
So that is the story of Barton H. Jenks and his (sort of) rolling block rifle idea.
Very cool to get a chance to look at both of these,
it's neat to see both the conversion and the built from scratch model side by side.
Gives you an idea of what some of the inventors were doing at the time.
If you would like one or both of these, of course they are coming up for sale here at Rock Island.
You can check out their pictures and description in their catalogue, as well as all of the other cool stuff in that auction.
Thanks for watching.
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