Troy Sweeney hefted a small hand axe and chopped away a section of bark from the wide-waisted maple on his family land in southern Indiana. He peered at the exposed wood and recognized he had something special here: a dense hardwood with a grain and curl that was particularly suited for use as a rifle stock. A slab of that hard-rock sugar maple went to Marvin Kemper for him to use in building the Official Indiana State Rifle’s authorized reproduction, coming up for public auction in the autumn of 2016.
It’s easy to see how John Small’s “Grouseland Rifle” might be named as Indiana’s Official Rifle in 2012 in tribute to our frontier heritage. John Small built the flintlock rifle around 1803, and also built rifles, pistols, tomahawks for figures like Francis Vigo and explorer William Clark. The gun is a fine example of the "Golden Age" long rifle: slender and even elegant, a finely striped maple stock with an ornate brass patch box engraved with the Angel Gabriel and her trumpet, pierced silver inlays, a sterling medallion on one cheek piece showing a coat of military arms, and on top of the eight-sided barrel, a silver plate where the man signed his work: "Jn Small Vincennes." The rifle is as much a piece of art as it is a tool of iron and wood.
John Small (1759-1821) was not only a gunmaker, blacksmith, and silversmith who worked his trade for nearly forty years, he was a surveyor and land developer, tavern owner and ferry operator, militia colonel and adjutant general of William Henry Harrison's territorial militia, and an elected territorial legislator. He’s recognized as the first sheriff in Indiana, and even today the deputies in Knox County wear a patch recognizing him: "First in Indiana-1790."
When Marvin’s reproduction of the State Rifle comes available for auction, he’ll deliver the rifle in a walnut display box, velvet-lined, with the lid displaying the Official State Seal of Indiana – a design also credited to John Small.
It’s clear the Grouseland Rifle has deep connections to Indiana history, but so does the reproduction. Marvin learned his craft at the workbench where his father Cornell Kemper produced more than 3,000 flintlocks over five decades in the small Dubois County town of Ferdinand. Marvin uses many of the same 19th-century chisels, awls, and engraving tools he inherited from his father.
The reproduction's tiger-striped maple stock comes from the hills of Martin County, harvested by a man whose heritage reaches back to before Indiana was a state. Troy Sweeney’s 5x great-grandfather Thomas Jordan was one of George Rogers Clark’s “Long Knives” who in 1779 captured Fort Sackville from the British in Vincennes. Another of Troy’s great-grandfathers was John McCoy, the last of Harrison's soldiers killed by Shawnee in the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811.
It feels like this reproduction has nearly as strong a connection to Indiana history as does the original Grouseland Rifle: Marvin as the second-generation Indiana gunmaker with decades of direct and inherited experience. Richly striped sugar maple that grew in southern Indiana soil, harvested by Troy, whose ancestors shed blood on that soil fighting for independence.
