Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Savage Collectors Throw Back Thursday - The Breakup

This attachment looks long, but it's easy and fast to breeze through and get a sense of what happened.
Basically, Arthur signed a 3 year contract for his services with Savage Arms in 1903 for $4000 per year.
It is not clear why this contract occurred, but in Jan. 1905 Savage Arms decided to renege on the final year of the contract.
Arthur went after Savage for breach of contract as he claimed to be ready, willing and able to fulfill the contract although by this time he and family had relocated to Duarte, CA.
Ultimately Savage Arms continued Arthur's salary for most of the final year and Arthur prevailed in the end with a judgement of $666.66, the final two months of the contract.

State of New york Supreme Court

Don't blame him, that's a significant amount of money... over $125,000 in today's dollars.

Kind of wonder what the motivation was for the split. If I had to venture a guess, given his eclectic life, probably heavily sidetracked in other projects by that point. 🤷‍♂️

The guy was a true renaissance man.

I think you are both correct.

Here's a newspaper article about the lawsuit that mentions another claim for money owed, read the last paragraph, not the circled ones. Evidently A. W. left town owing back rent to the Westminster Church Society and they made an attachment on any settlement. He was still getting paid by Savage Arms at that time and also had received a large payment from Savage for his inventions so he should have had the money to pay his rent, the amount seems very high for the time, $250, so he must have not paid them for quite a while. The Payment of $21,000 and his leaving town 'owing quite a number of bills" is mentioned in the circled part on the upper right.



Added, found some more about the case, one is hard to read but seems to state that the lien by the Church against A. W.'s settlement with Savage Arms was upheld and they got their money (middle article on the right).

Like most bright guys I'll bet old Arthur got bored easily. Once you've mastered something why beat it into the ground - time to move on to the next thing.

Only $4000/year may have tee'd him off too. Sure it was a lot of money back then, but to keep it in perspective, at the same time Stevens hired Harry Pope with a contract for $1000/year more than Arthur was getting, and he only needed to supervise their barrel shop.