This 1860 Henry rifle was purchased for the Wilson's Creek National Battlefield/Morphy Auctions

A rare 1860 Henry rifle has been purchased by the Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield Foundation for display at the national battlefield in Missouri.

The foundation will present the rifle to Wilson’s Creek acting Superintendent Russ Runge in an outdoor ceremony at 1 p.m. on  June 23 at Stop 5 on the battlefield’s tour road. The ceremony will include appropriate precautions against COVID-19 including social distancing. Attendees are encouraged to wear masks, but masks are not required. The event is free.

The foundation purchased the .44 caliber Model 1860 Henry rifle at auction for the park’s permanent collection. While this weapon was made in 1864 and has no connection to the 1861 Battle of Wilson’s Creek, the rifle belonged to a Missouri veteran of the Trans-Mississippi Theater of the Civil War. 

The original owner, Major George W. Fulton, hailed from Edina, Missouri. Fulton served with the 21st Missouri Infantry, a Union regiment that saw extensive service during the war, including at Shiloh, Corinth, Pleasant Hill, Tupelo, and Nashville.

Fulton remained with the regiment from July 1861 until his resignation in December 1864. He likely bought the Henry rifle around the time he left military service and entered into a new role – as sheriff of Knox County, Missouri. He also later served as mayor of Kinsley, Kansas, where he died in 1890.

Fulton purchased the rifle for $42 – then a princely sum for a firearm – and paid another $10 to have it engraved. The rifle includes embellishments of crossed flags, shields, oak leaves, a rope border, and the name “G.W. Fulton.”

The Henry was considered to be the most technologically advanced small arm of the Civil War period. A lever-action repeating rifle, the Henry’s 15-round magazine holds self-contained metallic cartridges. This rifle allowed a soldier to fire 15 to 30 shots per minute, while a soldier carrying a single-shot muzzle-loading rifle-musket could fire only two to three shots per minute. It became known as the “sixteen shooter” because one round could be chambered while 15 rounds sat in the magazine.

According to the National Museum of American History, the New Haven Arms Company presented Abraham Lincoln a Henry rifle featuring gold fittings in 1862 “in an effort to obtain his influence in their purchase for the war effort.”

The company made about 14,000 of the rifles between 1860 and 1866, but the U.S. Ordnance Department purchased only about 1,731 of the rifles. However, many soldiers acquired their own Henrys, which were popular in Missouri, Kentucky, Illinois, and Indiana. One Confederate soldier is rumored to have said, “It’s a rifle you could load on Sunday and shoot all week long.”

Fulton’s Henry rifle will be displayed in the Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield’s renovated visitor center, tentatively set to reopen in October. The planned exhibit will highlight the history of Civil War weapons technology and give visitors a greater appreciation of the rapid advance in arms technology during this period. The rifle draws a clear distinction between pre-war single-shot weapons and the repeating rifles that dominated after the war.

Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield Foundation is the support and fund-raising partner for Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield, with the mission of encouraging awareness, appreciation, education, and development of the park, as well as raising funds for various projects not covered by the National Park Service. The foundation also recently contributed an additional $40,000 to the visitor center renovation project to provide content for electronic displays highlighting several aspects of the Battle of Wilson’s Creek and the Civil War.