Claude Fuller Collection

Legion Para

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Summer is just around the corner and with it traveling. While Gettysburg is overwhelmed during the Summer months, perhaps Chickamauga would an acceptable alternative. Besides the battlefield, you will find the World famous Claude Fuller firearms collection.

I highly recommend a visit to Chickamauga.

https://www.nps.gov/chch/learn/historyculture/fuller-gun-collection.htm


The Fuller Gun Collection
Clause-Fuller.jpg

Claude Fuller and the Fuller Gun Collection
NPS Photo

Do you remember as a child getting your first bottle cap or baseball card and how it made you want to collect more? Claud Fuller’s impressive collection of firearms began the same way in a Kansas hardware store. A single quarter bought him a small pistol and two boxes of cartridges. The mechanics of the pistol fascinated him so much it led him into a career as an engineer and grew into a lifelong passion for collecting firearms.
But Fuller’s career and hobby did not come easily. He dropped out of school at age 12 and went to work in a Kansas City flour mill. His fascination with the way things work continued, as he later found a job as an engineer in the brick-making business.

Armed with only a 7th grade education, Fuller’s career as an engineer blossomed to produce an incredible 48 patents for brick-making processes and machinery. But firearms remained his passionate hobby. By 1923, after thirty-seven years of collecting, the growing collection included over 2,000 items.

Fuller was not alone as his career and hobby developed. Since long hours at the office often kept Fuller from travelling to gun sales, his wife Zenada haunted auctions and estate sales alone to purchase rare guns, often mixing in purchases of quilts and other nick-knacks to hide her pursuit of the weapons. In addition, she taught herself typing and stenography to help Fuller publish several books on firearms.

In 1933, Fuller retired and he and Zenada moved to a 50-acre farm east of Chattanooga, Tennessee which they called Fulleridge. At Fulleridge, the Fuller gun collection became famous, featured in numerous newspaper and magazine articles with an average of 5,000 people per year visiting.

Fuller-Gun-Collection-Young-Visitor.jpg

A young visitor explores the Fuller Gun Collection on display in the Chickamauga Battlefield Visitor Center
NPS Photo

In 1949, the Fullers decided something more needed to be done to display the collection. They offered a portion to Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, stipulating the collection always remained in the park to be studied and admired by the visiting public.

Sadly, Zenada passed away during the donation process. Fuller dove into the display, working with park staff to organize and install the weapons in a newly constructed museum wing. It was unveiled in a special ceremony on July 4, 1954, a fitting day since many of the weapons may have been used to secure the very freedoms being celebrated.

Fuller continued to visit the park and his collection, never failing to share some new tidbit of knowledge with park staff and visitors. He died in 1957 after 80 years of sharing his passion for technology and mechanics with thousands of people, both in person and in writing.

Though Claud and Zenada Fuller are no longer here to share personal stories of their magnificent collection, it lives on at Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. Perhaps as you tour this timeline of technology and mechanical development, that maybe you will find that the Fullers’ fascination and passion lives on in you, the park visitor. Today the Fuller Gun Collection is on display at the Chickamauga Battlefield Visitor Center.

 
Summer is just around the corner and with it traveling. While Gettysburg is overwhelmed during the Summer months, perhaps Chickamauga would an acceptable alternative. Besides the battlefield, you will find the World famous Claude Fuller firearms collection.

I highly recommend a visit to Chickamauga.

https://www.nps.gov/chch/learn/historyculture/fuller-gun-collection.htm


The Fuller Gun Collection
Clause-Fuller.jpg

Claude Fuller and the Fuller Gun Collection
NPS Photo

Do you remember as a child getting your first bottle cap or baseball card and how it made you want to collect more? Claud Fuller’s impressive collection of firearms began the same way in a Kansas hardware store. A single quarter bought him a small pistol and two boxes of cartridges. The mechanics of the pistol fascinated him so much it led him into a career as an engineer and grew into a lifelong passion for collecting firearms.
But Fuller’s career and hobby did not come easily. He dropped out of school at age 12 and went to work in a Kansas City flour mill. His fascination with the way things work continued, as he later found a job as an engineer in the brick-making business.

Armed with only a 7th grade education, Fuller’s career as an engineer blossomed to produce an incredible 48 patents for brick-making processes and machinery. But firearms remained his passionate hobby. By 1923, after thirty-seven years of collecting, the growing collection included over 2,000 items.

Fuller was not alone as his career and hobby developed. Since long hours at the office often kept Fuller from travelling to gun sales, his wife Zenada haunted auctions and estate sales alone to purchase rare guns, often mixing in purchases of quilts and other nick-knacks to hide her pursuit of the weapons. In addition, she taught herself typing and stenography to help Fuller publish several books on firearms.

In 1933, Fuller retired and he and Zenada moved to a 50-acre farm east of Chattanooga, Tennessee which they called Fulleridge. At Fulleridge, the Fuller gun collection became famous, featured in numerous newspaper and magazine articles with an average of 5,000 people per year visiting.

Fuller-Gun-Collection-Young-Visitor.jpg

A young visitor explores the Fuller Gun Collection on display in the Chickamauga Battlefield Visitor Center
NPS Photo

In 1949, the Fullers decided something more needed to be done to display the collection. They offered a portion to Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, stipulating the collection always remained in the park to be studied and admired by the visiting public.

Sadly, Zenada passed away during the donation process. Fuller dove into the display, working with park staff to organize and install the weapons in a newly constructed museum wing. It was unveiled in a special ceremony on July 4, 1954, a fitting day since many of the weapons may have been used to secure the very freedoms being celebrated.

Fuller continued to visit the park and his collection, never failing to share some new tidbit of knowledge with park staff and visitors. He died in 1957 after 80 years of sharing his passion for technology and mechanics with thousands of people, both in person and in writing.

Though Claud and Zenada Fuller are no longer here to share personal stories of their magnificent collection, it lives on at Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. Perhaps as you tour this timeline of technology and mechanical development, that maybe you will find that the Fullers’ fascination and passion lives on in you, the park visitor. Today the Fuller Gun Collection is on display at the Chickamauga Battlefield Visitor Center.

Have studied this collection several times when i've been to Chickamauga,it is a bucket list must see.
 
I have visited the Fuller collection several times. Over 75 years ago I visited it when it was on Lookout Mountain and then in its present location. They have notes on every weapon. I had a rare musket and the only other one I had seen was in the Fuller Museum. They gave me the notes which helped to clarify facts about the weapon.
 
My Grandparent lived on the edge of the battlefield and my Grandfather would take my brother and I o the museum and I would stand in wonder at this collection. It has to be on our schedule at our annual meeting this fall.
 
Fabulous collection! Thanks for sharing!
I've got a ways to go....
 
I'm so glad the Fuller collection is preserved for all to enjoy at Chickamauga. And it was a good thing that Fuller stipulated that it had to remain on display in order for the NPS to retain possession, otherwise it might be in a basement somewhere. Just like what happened to the weapons collection at Gettysburg NPS. After the new visitor's center was built, the collection went away. So now the best NPS collection that is still available to view is the Fuller collection.
 
I emailed Kim Coons at the Chickamauga and Chatanooga NMP. She's the Chief of Interpretation and Resource Education. I was trying to find out if the Claude Fuller collection had any Merrills, as I'm collecting pics/histories for a future website dedicated to all things James H. Merrill. She forwarded my inquiry to Historian James Ogden.

Would anyone who's been there and seen the collection noticed any Merrills (carbines, rifles, bayonets, cases)? Any pics you could send my way? Thanks, Eric in too-far-away WI (maybe a roadtrip someday)
 
I emailed Kim Coons at the Chickamauga and Chatanooga NMP. She's the Chief of Interpretation and Resource Education. I was trying to find out if the Claude Fuller collection had any Merrills, as I'm collecting pics/histories for a future website dedicated to all things James H. Merrill. She forwarded my inquiry to Historian James Ogden.

Would anyone who's been there and seen the collection noticed any Merrills (carbines, rifles, bayonets, cases)? Any pics you could send my way? Thanks, Eric in too-far-away WI (maybe a roadtrip someday)
I have been there several times but in all honesty i can't say yes or no to your question.sorry.
 
Jim Ogden came through very nicely. He stated there were six Merrill's and at least one M1841 conversion to Merrill breech patent. He's going to send me hi-res single b/w pics of each plus any histories on record.

Would anyone near there volunteer to take nice close-ups with focus as well on serial numbers?

Eric
 
Jim Ogden came through very nicely. He stated there were six Merrill's and at least one M1841 conversion to Merrill breech patent. He's going to send me hi-res single b/w pics of each plus any histories on record.

Would anyone near there volunteer to take nice close-ups with focus as well on serial numbers?

Eric
Jim is the main man there.
 
I was lucky enough to see the exhibit again this April during my extensive tour of Civil War sites with Doug (@1863surgeon) and his son Bradley. I posted these few photos I took earlier at the time of our visit, but here they are again:

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The Fuller collection or United States firearms ranks as one of the best in the country. Included are multiple examples of all regulation military shoulder arms along with many rare and seldom-seen variants. They occupy multiple cases like the few pictured here and date from the beginning of firearms through at least the Second World War, although the thrust of the collection is the development of arms in the eras of the flintlock and percussion systems.

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Shoulder arms of the Civil War are especially well-represented from the products of the National Armories at Harper's Ferry and Springfield to their contract versions and European imports such as those from Britain like the Enfields, Austrian Lorenz's, and other countries as well. below however are my favorites, those produced by the Confederacy at Richmond and Fayetteville, N. C., using captured machinery from the armory at Harper's Ferry.

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