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For gun collectors this was one of those Howard Carter moments. Asked if he could see anything as he peered for the first time through a small hole in the door to King Tutankhamen’s tomb in the Valley of Kings, British Egyptologist Howard Cater responded with his famous words, “Yes, wonderful things!” Carter had unearthed the best preserved Egyptian pharaoh tomb to date.
In a home in Marshfield two boys and their grandparents had their own moment of discovering “wonderful things.” For nearly 90 years Henry Nelson’s crate sat undisturbed and forgotten in an attic of a home that dated back some 30 years prior to the Salem witch trials. During those decades the world around it continued on. The house welcomed and passed through several generations of Nelsons. Sixteen U.S. Presidents came and went. Stock markets rose and crashed. Two world wars exploded and a cold war simmered. Through all of this and more, Nelson’s crate did nothing more than sit quietly in the safety of the old Nelson home, waiting for a time to be reintroduced
to the world, which came in the summer of 1974. When the lid was finally removed, 87 years after being delivered new from the factory, the crate exposed a Winchester Model 1886 rifle in a lightly tooled leather scabbard, so its true beauty remained hidden a few moments longer until it was unholstered. No longer in the darkness, the rifle displayed all of its glory, perfectly preserved. This
is how it left the factory: neatly packed in the wooden crate with its scabbard and boxes of ammunition! The Winchester .45-90 WCF boxes of ammunition feature a
green label marked “Cartridges for Model 1886” along with an illustration of a bullet. As for the crate, the lid is boldly marked with the name “H.W. Nelson” along with “BOSTON/ MASS/C/O Meredith K Nelson/4 Exchange Place” and has an Adams Express Company paper label. A few of the original nails removed by Frederic Milholland remain. The crate continues to carry the original packing material: a combination of standard period packing sheets of paper and wadded up section from the want ads from a period newspaper.
So, what does a family do after they come across a find
of the century? In this case, the young boys immediately paraded the rifle around the house and took their photos with it. The rifle and its contents were taken to a local appraiser who proved he knew what he was looking at.
It appraised at $20,000 and based on inflation is around $135,000 in today’s money. The family remembers the appraiser having the rifle for a long time and having
to ask for it to be returned. The appraiser removed the black powder from the cartridges out of caution. In 1977, the house on the “Big Hill” was sold. The rifle and its
crate traveled with Margaret and her husband Frederic Milholland to Princeton, New Jersey and then later to California. As a model of rifle intended for frontier use, this rifle had finally made it out West. Better late than never! In time, the rifle was passed on to their daughter Jean where it once again took safe residency in an attic. After Jean’s death ownership fell to her children. For nearly 140 years, the rifle was cared for by the descendants of the original
owner Rev. Henry Nelson, and now, in 2024, it is presented to the world for the first time so that a new family can carry on its legacy. A notarized letter of provenance from one of Jean’s sons is included along with two digital images of the Nelson family.
The powerful Winchester Model 1886 is by far one of
the most iconic lever action rifles of all time and remains popular with collectors, shooters, and hunters to this
day as one of the strongest lever action designs ever developed. This rugged and dependable rifle was invented by prolific firearms inventor John Moses Browning and
was his first repeating rifle design to enter production
but was far from his last. Browning’s design was tweaked for production by none other than William Mason of Colt Single Action Army fame. The Model 1886 kept Winchester at the top of the lever action market. While a shorter action than the Model 1876, the Model 1886 was able to chamber longer cartridges, including the .45-70 Government, and
its stronger locking block design was able to handle higher pressures even as Winchester made the jump to smokeless powders. The locking bolts on the ‘86 pass vertically through the bolt securing it firmly in place, and the design was also sleeker by abandoning dust covers and switching to an internal cartridge elevator. A powerful, dependable rifle was highly valued in the American West in the late 19th century, and remained desirable for hunters through the 20th century and on to today.