Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Savage Collectors Earliest Enoch Tue engraved rifle?

Does anyone have a factory letter on an engraved gun that they could share with us. George Adams indicated in a 1988 article that these engraved rifles might simply be marked as "special order" in the records.
He also indicated that the work orders from which the engraver worked are thought to have been destroyed.
Perhaps we will never know how many engraved 1899s existed at one time.
BillR

Heres a ledger page...70152 was Kings rifle.
No mention of the engraving...

Heres a family write up on King...

Jed, have we seen a picture of the King rifle? Not sure which one it is.

BillR, I have a Tue engraved rifle where the letter from Callahan shows no mention of the engraving. So even if most rifle entries do mention engraving, there are others that aren't mentioned and we'll never be able to count them from the records.

Callahan mentioned at the Fest that it's normal for engraved rifles to be noted in the records, but it's not unheard of to have no mention.

King rifle...

Wow! That's beautiful engraving and stock work. What's the story behind the "king rifle"?

Thanks for sharing,
Mike

What story ya lookin for?
How I sweated for weeks waiting for the rifle to arrive from AZ?
Calhoun,
Leroy told me on one rifle that was entered in the Savage records that reads "sell to Tue for good price".

Is it posssible that some guns were sold to dealers, shipped to the dealer and then the dealer returned them to Mr Tue directly, for engraving when a customer decided to upgrade the rifle? And it was never recorded in the records because it never when thru Savage. My 2 cents

IMHO- Somestimes they just did not record the details,depending on who was doing records that day,week or year.It was not in there mindset that someday people would collect these rifles and want detailed info.remember this was way back when...
I have an engraved savage in rival grade,yet it does not mention it in the letter.However it does say in Callahans letter "note to engrave butt". It also goes on to say that the original consignee is F. Peters, who was Frederick Peters,a savage export dealer with offices in Athens, Greece and Hamburg, Germany.
I am certain it is factory engraved and has 3x wood with flame checkering.Buttplate is not engraved andall serial numbers match. I'm sure he used it as a salesman's sample to show to potential customers.
As I said earlier,I think there are more than a few factory engraved rifles that are factory, but not mentioned in a letter.I myself have had 3 or 4 that were not specifically mentioned in letters. I'm sure others that have had egraved rifles also have noticed this. Doug

That 32-40 1/2 Octagon that I sold to Rick a few years back was also shown in the ledger as going to W.I. King.
Would surprise me none if King took the 32-40 for services rendered to SAC.

On vintage Marlin rifles, it was common for factory engraving not to be mentioned in the factory ledgers also. Even more so than Savage. I wonder if for the same reason or reasons (whatever the reasons really were)??

nice to know