A few days ago, we published a photo of Herb Stapleton’s dog Hoss, tough, talented wingman to Awbonnie’s Bull. In that picture was Herb’s shotgun, a Winchester Model 59 12-gauge. Eric shot a 59 as well for many years. I suppose it is safe to say that if Eric had notched the stock for every grouse he and his Huntmore dogs took over that well-kept autoloader, he’d have likely been on his second or third stick of wood before Bull retired.
The story of those pioneering “ultralight” upland guns is worth the telling. The 59 was a revolutionary 12-bore manufactured from 1959 to 1965, built around an ingenious floating breech invented by an ex-moonshiner and convicted murderer named David Marshall Williams.
When Williams lost his job on the local railroad, he began moonlighting in moonshine, ramrodding a lucrative network of stills in Prohibition-era Cumberland County, North Carolina. A 1921 raid on one of the camps surprised Williams and his crew into a fire fight with law enforcement, ending in the killing of a deputy sheriff. Nobody could be certain who fired that fatal shot. But Williams, as the boss of the criminal operation, was charged with first degree murder.
Williams’ first trial produced a hung jury. Although he would forever claim his innocence, Williams was urged to cut a deal, pleading guilty to second-degree murder rather than risk possible execution if he were to be retried. The sentence was 20-30 years in North Carolina’s Caledonia State Prison.
Williams was a hard case and spent much of his early incarceration in solitary confinement. While in stir, the life-long gun nut made drawings on any scrap of paper he could find, putting to paper ideas he had for self-loading firearms.
It was his decision to make his jail stretch easier and the discovery by H.T. Peoples, prison superintendent, of his interests that landed Williams in the prison machine shop repairing weapons carried by the guards. Williams’ work was so amazing that, challenged by the superintendent, he began building entire firearms from scrap materials and designing improvements in conventional firearms. In letters to his mother, Williams requested technical information, some drafting tools, and contact with patent attorneys for protection of his experiments.
So it was behind bars that Williams came up with the “floating chamber,” a short-stroke pistol system to operate semi-automatic guns. When word of Williams’ amazing work leaked over the state prison walls, the Colt Patent Firearms Company petitioned the North Carolina prison system to allow visitation by their research and development team, while family and influential friends, aided by the widow of the slain peace officer, worked nonstop to get Williams’ sentence reduced. By September of 1929, Williams walked through the gates a free man.
In an interesting sidebar, Superintendent Peoples was published in the March 1951 edition of Reader's Digest, writing under the magazine's regular feature "The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met." That character, of course, was Williams.
Williams worked the next two years to perfect his floating chamber concepts before securing contracts to convert .30 caliber machine guns to .22 rimfire for cost-effective training purposes. Later, his ingenious design would form the heart of the M1 Carbine carried by some 8 million servicemen in WWII, a weapon that General MacArthur credited with turning the tide in the Pacific theater of war. On the strength of his M1 innovations, David Marshall Williams would forever more be “Carbine” Williams to people in the industry.
After the war, he moved to New Haven, worked as a consultant for the military and was a critical part of the Winchester development team. A screenplay was written, based in part on the Reader's Digest piece, and Jimmy Stewart played Williams in a 1952 biopic. His image restored, Williams returned home, built a state of the art machine shop, and eventually held over 60 US Patents. Williams’ shop would eventually be moved, intact, to the North Carolina State Department of Archives and History, and is there on display in its museum.
Williams’ floating breech/short stroke mechanism was the guts of the Winchester Model 59 that a New England sportswriter named Frank Woolner popularized for upland gunners.
Woolner was a veteran of the Normandy invasion, historian for the legendary 3rd Armor “Spearhead” Division. After the war, the avid angler and hunter returned to Massachusetts to work as a newspaper columnist, focusing on saltwater and freshwater fishing, as well as upland game shooting. He and his brother Jack were among the pioneers of “outdoor” programming for television, hosting a weekly show called Woolner Brothers Outdoors. He wrote a number of books about hunting and fishing, and it was through his 1970 title Grouse and Grouse Hunting that a young Eric Jacobs discovered the allure of the Model 59.
Carbine Williams’ “floating breech” system works this way. Ignition of the shotshell makes the breach into a sort of short pistol, driving the bolt a tenth of an inch rearward. A powerful spring pushes back against the bolt as it collects a cartridge from the magazine and feeds it into the chamber. Shooting one of these classic guns comes with a very mechanical sensation that can be unsettling at first.
The gun was purpose built for carry. Its “Winlite” barrel featured fused and bonded fiber thread covering a thin metal tube while an aluminum alloy receiver also trimmed ounces off the weight of a conventional autoloader. The 59 could be ordered with among the first choke tubes offered to the public (marked “Versachoke” by Winchester).
In all, the gun weighed 6 and 1/2 lbs. But Woolner, an inveterate tinkerer, made what he considered to be custom improvements on the factory model.
First he bobbed the barrel from 26” to 23”, making the gun’s choke a nominal “cylinder” affair, suitable for the close quarters of Woolner’s New England grouse coverts. The magazine tube was also shortened to hold but two shells. Finally, Woolner hacked a straight hand grip out of the factory walnut stock and shaved more ounces from the forend by sanding it to but a whisper. This also aided in balancing the gun better between the hands, as the original factory 59's were notoriously butt heavy because of that fiberglass-wound barrel.
Woolner’s own Model 59 ended up scaling 5 lbs. 11 ounces. In his up and down uplands, let alone Eric Jacobs’ mountains, every ounce saved is precious.
Over the years, Eric literally wore out not one, but two Winchester Model 59’s. When he could no longer find parts, he went to a choke-tubed Franchi 48AL 20 gauge "Upland Model" that weighed right around 5 and ½ lbs. The gun had a straight hand grip, and Eric cut the stock to match the dimensions of the Model 59 that had served him so well. That gave the Franchi a slightly deeper drop and shorter length of pull for a fast mount and, for Eric, a better look over that abbreviated barrel. He ran Remington Premier #8 copper-plated shot through the little Franchi, and his good shooting continued.
The Franchi would be the last Huntmore autoloader. The double gun bug was about to bite Eric Jacobs…but that’s a story for another time.