May have been made up for (or even BY) an employee. I don't know if this happened at Winchester, but it certainly did at other US mfrs.
Lots of guns from the immediate postwar period were made from cleanups of existing new but no longer fashionable parts put on new receivers. I've had several suspects over the years, but couldn't ever prove the "stories" that said so. (So I didn't pay for the stories, just the gun.....).
My Savage 23B .25-20 bolt repeater is one of those, a new condition gun with a postwar serial but in a no-longer-produced caliber.
You have, at the very worst, a very handsome and interesting deerslayer!
