Circa 1990, I stumbled on to the original piece at a gun show, it was for sale for $125, and I got it for $100. It was missing it's rammer, one thimble, the sideplate and the lock had been percussioned. Yeah, sounds like a wreck, but in the grand scheme of antique guns, for $100 that is still a great deal and quite restoreable, since the stock hadn't been cut back to modernize it in the 19th century like so many others. I began the restoration process, in that I removed the drum and fabricated a touchhole liner for it. Then the project lay dormant for about a decade.

Around 1998, I got it in my head to build a copy of it to shoot. The resulting gun was a one of a kind custom that had almost $800 woth of parts into it, not counting labor. All of my friends saw it, and everybody wanted it. It is way lighter than a full-sized military musket. My copy was done with a 12-ga barrel, and I can hit a 3" gong at 40 yards with it.

A few years went by, and various people badgered me about doing a production gun based on the Ketland. I figured its time had come, so I began to work out the details. Then, Mark Humpal (big time antique dealer in this area who specializes in original Native American stuff and colonial frontier stuff) came up with a gun that was nearly it's twin at the Brimfield Antiques show! It too had been percussioned, but it was otherwise complete and still had it's sideplate, so we have a rubbing of it to see exactly what the engraving should be (a dragon). This same sideplate shows up in Hamilton's book Colonial Frontier Guns, there are about 8 others known to exist, mostly from archaelogical contexts.

The original gun has a .53 cal smoothbore barrel, 36" long. It is not cut for a bayonet. For practical reasons, we are doing the production guns in .62 cal. If you are a reenactor, and the gun were made in .53, you'd have to make your own weird little cartridges because 100 grains is just too loud in a bore that small. If it is in .62, it is large enough that you can use borrowed cartridges mooched from other people in your group, casualties etc. The other change we are making from typical Ketland guns of the era is to add a bridle to the frizzen screw. This makes for a stronger, faster lock and makes mounting a flashguard soooo much easier. If someone wanted it to be 100% correct as a Ketland style lock, all you'd have to do is grind off the bridle and shorten the frizzen screw. It's much easier to remove metal than to add it!

We feel that the original gun was custom made for an individual since there is so much cast-off to the butt. You can shoulder it and take aim using your left eye! The reproduction is being made with a straight stock.

In typical Ketland style, the barrel is marked London on top, but had Birmingham proof marks. Many Birmingham guns were marked London because it made them seem classier. Kind of like today when we pretend our cars and trucks are made in Detroit, but are really from Mexico and Canada.

We got quite a surprise when we removed the barrel from the stock. On top, the barrel is brown from age and handling, and we assumed it would have been bright when new. Nope. Under the woodline, the barrel showed it's original blue finish! I had read referances to certain French guns being blued in the 18th century, and some English fowlers and shotguns, but never a paramilitary piece like this!

We were going to have the reproduction Ketland blued as well, to be 100% authentic, but all of the people who were interested in the gun were resistant to the idea for whatever reason. The way I see it, if you have a chance to do something correct but controversial, it makes sense to do it and use it as a teaching moment. To satify the people who are afraid to make waves and have a blue gun, no matter how correct it may be, we ended up doing the copy in polished steel instead of blue. For those of you who are not afraid to make waves and explain to others that bluing IS historically correct to the 18th century, you can certainly blue the barrel.

It has a Brown Bess style thumbplate, only scaled down to fit the gun. The rammer thimbles are sheet brass (the repro uses cast thimbles). There is no nose cap. In looking at the spacing of the thimbles, there is a possibility that the barrel has been shortened as the spacing is not symmetrical. We copied the spacing of the thimbles right from the original, odd spacing and all.

This is a pet project for me, I had been on the fence about reproducing it for a long time and have spent a lot of time studying other Ketland pieces. We have several other Ketland guns in our collection and have also had the privilege of examining many original muskets made by the Ketlands in private collections and museums. Now you can have a correct colonial era light fusil too!