We were very fortunate to be a part of the restoration process on this U.S Army Gatling gun which is just one of many from Kirk Brumbaugh's collection.

Here are some excerpts from an article that was published in Omaha Magazine regarding Kirk and his gun collection. We will also provide the link below so you can read the full article as well. It's well worth a read!

                                                                      Photo Credit: Omaha Magazine

“This gun: it sat from, as best I can tell, the early 1900s until 1967 in a rural community in Missouri. Where generations of school children had carved their names into the brass receiver and wooden carriage,” he said, detailing his search and rescue mission of this artifact from small-town America’s forgotten shadows.

“The gun had been unprotected, left to rust and decay in a public square in a small town in Missouri,” Brumbaugh said. “The individual that I purchased it from, when he bought it, it had been rusted solid. The carriage had rotted away, so the only things left were a pile of rotted wood and rusted iron.”

This is what Brumbaugh does, finds above-ground buried treasure.

He relishes in relics.

Once he locates an item he determines to be historically significant, he moves in—using a team of like-minded, highly skilled restoration experts—and attempts to bring these weapons to their former glory.

For Brumbaugh and his team, people as far away as Boston, the U.K., and Australia that he knows and trusts with such delicate work, this is a full and honest recreation. This is no mere spit-shine or quick coat of paint.

“The Gatling gun I have is highly specialized, so if you have an item of historical significance—then you have to research and find the best people to work on it.”

Brumbaugh truly cherishes the historical accuracy of his restoration projects.

“I wanted it to be a historically accurate restoration. So, when I got it, I sent it back to the guy that had done the initial reconstruction: Barry Anderson in Ohio. I contacted Hansens (a world renowned wagon and carriage restoration company in South Dakota) and got blueprints from Cullity & Son Co. in Boston, to rebuild the carriage from a pile of scrap and do a final restoration of the metal parts. They made it possible to build a historically accurate carriage for an 1879 gun.”

With so few of these types of weapons still in existence, this was no paint-by-numbers job. It was custom and required creative work and lots of digging through the archives to make sure that it was as close to accurate as could be.

You can finish reading the rest of the article HERE