Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Savage Collectors Still not for sale! LOL!!

So, I'm back a day and got a PM and was asked the inevitable:

"Do I still have the Bird's Eye Maple 1899, and do I want to sell it?"

Sorry folks, yes I still have it, but it is not for sale.

I had better pictures at one time but Photobucket ate them.

You sure?😁

I'll trade you Roy for it!

Going to offer a deal he can't refuse as there is an export near ready to leave the US for down under

1 tiger snake
2 funnel web spiders
if you play hard ball I will through 2 drought effected kangaroos

Please no pm's from others this is one off deal for Rom

Johno

When I saw your post yesterday, that rifle was my first thought. Beauty!

And It's even prettier in person!

Being new here I've never seen it, could you give us newer guys more info? Did you stock it? What caliber? You know, all the goods.

Lettered factory birdseye maple stocks, one-of-a-kind!

This is a copy/paste from a 10 year old post. The pictures were corrupted by photobucket so they are gone. I'll have to take some new pictures someday. This was not my first Savage 99 but it was the beginning of my Savage addiction. I was just woke enough to know that it was really something special when I got it. I had been deer hunting with a nice R for a long time. I was too poor/stupid to buy the 1895 that was also at the same shop for $395!

So, back in December I got lucky and walked into an small shop and got a really good deal on an original configuration 1899 A with a unique Bird's Eye Maple Stock. I got a lot of help here and have spent the last few months trying to piece together what I could to learn about its' history. I said at the time I would report what I learned when I was done, so here it is.

Below is the gun, it has a 26 inch round barrel with no rust or pitting, good case coloring on the lever, a plain shotgun type butt plate, and no crown. The wood is special order Birds Eye Maple and has a Schnabel forearm and straight grip stock with no checkering, it has period correct eyes for shoulder strap. The serial number is on the butt plate, forearm, stock heal, and receiver. The historian at Griffin & Howe says the front blade sight is German silver in the standard Rocky Mountain pattern, with the rear sight being in the Savage Rocky Mountain pattern Buckhorn type. Caliber is .303. There are no numbers on the cartridge counter.

Savage Completed the gun and it was accepted from the warehouse on June 26,1901. It was later sent to a show in Detroit in January of 1903. Savage Records call it the "Detroit Show". After the show it was sent back to Savage and was sold on March 16, 1903 to a New York City based sporting goods store called VonLengerke & Detmold. This is as far as John Callahan's letter, a copy of which is attached below, could take me. Further research showed that VonLengerke & Detmold was purchased by Abercrombie & Fitch before WWII and that after WWII, Griffin & Howe bought out Abercrombie & Fitch . I sent a letter to Griffin & Howe with pictures requesting information but had not heard from them in over a month when Sqweeler PM'd me and said that he saw my serial number on the G&H research web site. I called right away and the historian answered my call and confirmed that they had the information I was looking for. For $50 I got the letter you see below as well as photo copies of the pages of the original ledgers from 1903 & 1904. It only took 4 days to arrive. From the records I learned the gun was on display at the store in Manhattan but did not sell in 1903 so it was rolled over into the inventory for 1904. On November 18,1904 the gun was sold to Malcolm Baxter for $25.00. The price included a $5.00 upcharge for the Birds Eye Maple stock. This was confirmed in the Ledger. It was a real relief to finally see the description of the wood in writing on this gun that is almost 107 years old. It confirms without a doubt that it is all original.

Census records that were included in the $50 research fee shows that Malcolm Baxter was born in 1868 and he was the Vice President of a Coal Company and that he lived within a few blocks of the store in Manhattan with his extended family.

The information I was able to get confirms what a lot of you guys said, that the gun is right, and in the original configuration that it was made in in 1901. Jed put it best in one of his comments "That gun has become the cornerstone of your collection". It has and it is.

Many thanks to all those who helped me piece this together.

Roger

$5 charge for the birdseye maple stock is all? What a deal.. That was the same cost as a fancy American Walnut stock upgrade, the lowest upgrade. Fancy English Walnut was $10, Fancy Circassian Walnut was $15.

It's a beauty.

Your welome...For letting you know G&H had the record's.

This is the type of stuff that makes this site great. If you have the time to post better photos of the rifle, and new photos of the letters that would be great.
(I use an app called ClearScanner that takes excellent quality scans of documents with a smart phone.)

Amazing rifle! Thanks for posting that information, Romack. That rifle is a "never say never" rifle if ever there was one. Would love to see some new beauty pictures of it, that rifle sure deserves the full treatment. Have you ever shot it?

I still 'use' my pictures from photobucket, photobucket just reduces the quality in the links to try and get you to pay (it has to cost them more to do that then to just let them post!). If I don't have the originals on my newer computer I log into photobucket & down load them to use elsewhere - all are still there and the downloads are the original resolution. You can down load single pictures or whole albums, the albums download as zipped files and have to be extracted, so I think there might be a slight reduction in quality from the originals, but nothing I find noticeable.

Thanks for the tip Gene.

That sounds like a project for one of my tech savvy kids when they come home for the Holidays!

R

I found a few more pictures.

Here's a picture of the 1899 and another one with a maple stocked Savage/Fox Sterlingworth in 16 gauge.

Got to love the purple shells with those .303 Silvertips.





I'm not sure why the pictures are so small.

I'll futz with it later.