Benjamin Mills and the Beginnings of Our Modern Southern Sporting Life

Benjamin Mills and the Beginnings of Our Modern Southern Sporting Life
By Gary Dean Gardner, Independent Scholar of Southern History & Material Culture

I grew up knowing who Ben Mills was, and figured most everyone else did too, but then we had one of his classic walnut stocked target rifles leaning up against a corner at home.  Later it dawned on me that a century and a half ago, perhaps the Mills name was more common outside of central Kentucky, but that this modern era of disposability had perhaps obscured the legacy of this master craftsman.  I realized, too, that even I knew very little about the man, and only a smidgeon of the myth, so I set out to discover Benjamin Mills for myself and anyone else with an interest in what turned out to be a pivotal chapter in the development of our current Southern passion for the sporting lifestyle.  I learned along the way that the past isn’t so very distant, at least in Kentucky.

Certain objects and images just seem iconic in association with the Bluegrass of Kentucky, especially when it comes to the early history of this Commonwealth.  Kentucky brings to mind frosty bourbon filled coin silver julep cups, polished cherry sugar chests, and finely pieced quilts, but when it comes to guns, we tend to think of a frontier America and the fabled “long” rifle.  Originating in Pennsylvania or Maryland and brought through the Cumberland Gap, this legendary gun would be made famous by the “Kaintucks” who wielded them with tenacity and bravery in the settlement of a new state, and with a warrior’s valor at the Battle of New Orleans.  While clearly giving fame and name to the “Kentucky Long Rifle,” in actuality Kentucky was one of the places where the American sporting target rifle was innovated, and not the long rifle.

To best understand the birth of America’s sport shooting heritage, we have to visit a most charming Williamsburg-like colonial town, but moving quickly past the primitive connotation of a pioneer settlement where firearms functioned as tools to provide meat and protection.  Rather, let’s move ahead in time to an era where Federal brick town homes have replaced pioneer stockades, to a period when hemp and tobacco fields provided the wealth and leisure to aid the transition of the gunsmith's art to a precision instrument that stirred the passions of the quintessential Southern gentleman in whose hands a fine gun was his heritage, though no longer a necessity for preservation of hearth and home.  

Dr. C. C. Graham's "Springs" in Harrodsburg

Today the oldest city in Kentucky, which began in 1774 as James Harrod’s primitive fort protecting some 30 cabins from the native tribes, remains a small town jewel of the inner Bluegrass Region with countless architectural vestiges of antebellum splendor lining its shaded streets and dotting the pastoral countryside where Thoroughbred race horses and registered cattle serenely graze on savannah-like pastures much as they did in the middle of the 19th century.  Georgian, Federal, and grand Greek Revival mansions, the town homes of wealthy planters built long after the last fears of Indian attack, still grace this community as spectacular gems to be admired by those passing by, though the average tourist to Harrodsburg in Mercer County generally misses the modest markers that recount the story of Kentucky’s great summer resort that became the seasonal home of countless belles and beaus in those years prior to the nation’s separation for war in 1861.  Ladies and gentlemen of means from the Deep South were drawn in great numbers to “take the waters” and relax at Christopher Columbus Graham’s “Graham Springs”.  As a natural outreach to satisfy and entertain his guests, Graham sought out his friend and master gunsmith Benjamin Mills to create a diversion for his male guests, perhaps in an effort to afford himself a chance to hone his own skills and show them off to his influential and moneyed guests.  Through this collaboration was born the modern day shooting club.

Ben Mills' Home in Harrodsburg

Now clearly there had been competitions for supremacy in shooting long before, but these impromptu matches or “rifle frolics” with an emphasis generally on shooting actual game hadn’t required any specifications in weaponry and were more an opportunity to prove the best huntsman rather than the best marksman.  Such matches weren’t truly “matched” when participants brought to the field their varied gauged and ranged rifles, some of which were of ancient ancestry and never intended for competitive demonstration but rather for putting small game on the table.  Contests required skill, not in mastery of precision guns, but in compensating for their individual rifle’s’ flaws, wear, and age, and were held not as a challenge of skill but as an excuse for a community to celebrate after planting & harvests.  The only exception lay in the deadly gentlemanly encounters on the dueling field where the most skilled competitor claimed victory and superiority by walking away afterwards.  Benjamin Mills (1810-1889), much like his close friend C. C. Graham (1784-1885), was a 19th century entrepreneur who saw the potential in an untapped market.  Taking the already famed long rifle of Daniel Boone’s generation that was itself descended from the ancient German Jaeger flintlock hunting guns of the 17th and 18th centuries, he coupled this familiar pioneer relic meant for encounters with deer and bear with the refined accuracy of French and British duelers to innovate a gun solely for competitive use.  Thus was born the target rifle.

New York born Mills arrived in Kentucky in 1838 at a time of transition for his chosen art.  By the 1830s the native born gunsmiths of Kentucky, carrying on the craft of long rifle production as perfected by German and Scotch-Irish masters from Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina, were already struggling for a market.  Commercial manufacturers like James Brown and Sons of Pittsburgh, benefitting from Eli Whitney’s 1806 innovations in mass producing interchangeable parts for muskets, could economically manufacture and distribute functional, if not artistic, guns to compete with small scale, small town craftsmen whose outdated flintlocks were quickly losing demand to the new percussion systems.  Joseph Whitworth, a contemporary of Mills, would go even further in the latter 1850s to promote the modernization of gun making through mass production.  What’s more, Mills found plentiful competition in a waning marketplace, with an average of at least one gunsmith per county even by modern gerrymandering.  The practical solution, considering Mills’ apparent shunning of the coming industrialized “improvements” by way of mass machine production, was to pair his truly superior mechanical artistry with the apparent demand for a leisure gun in the burgeoning Southern market that was expanding along with the wealth of plantation owners after the turbulent financial losses of the 1820s.

His location of choice was ideal, as Harrodsburg and luxurious “Graham Springs” were drawing the elite of the plantation South for summer residencies.  In addition, being so well situated just 100 miles south of Cincinnati where the first trap shooting meet had been held in 1831, Mills was able to literally designate for himself a new national epicenter for the developing clientele of sporting gun aficionados.  Partnering with Graham, already known as one of the best shots in the nation, Mills was able to create an instant demand for his target rifles through the demonstrations performed by Graham and others in the newly formed “Boone Club”, one of the first of its kind in America to cater specifically to sports shooting.  Twelve charter members, including a Governor of Kentucky, brought attention to Mills and his fine guns from all over the country.  Their gaming organization gained renown as “the best shooting club in the world” per late 19th century state historian and biographer William Allen.  Graham even boasted in national papers and periodicals of his prowess with his own Mills rifle, denouncing the quality of guns from London and other famed gun making centers by challenging any opponent in the world to compete against the superiority of his skills matched with Ben Mills’ exceptional weaponry for a remarkable $10,000 purse, but the gauntlet was never picked up by any competitor.  Mills himself acted as recording secretary for the group, maintaining and publishing Dr. Graham’s shooting scores to affirm publicly the good doctor’s claims.

The Mills shop was certainly a bustling place at its peak of operations by the middle of the century as Benjamin’s fame spread and orders came in for guns to be sent across the country.  To maintain the reputation of his rifles, Mills had to seek out not only apprentices with potential, but trained craftsmen who in their own right were accomplished gunsmiths.  In 1850 and 1860, with the taking of the Federal Census, his familial household was enumerated along with the skilled young men in his employ that resided with their master.  Those young gunsmiths included Andrew Brass, Lucian Love, and Henry Stone.  Per descendants and somewhat substantiated by city directories, Whitney Meglone, step-son to a "Boone Club" member, worked under Ben Mills as well during this period.  In addition, Mills sought out young men who not only could make a gun, but shoot one with accuracy as well.  Likely the best shot among his employees was Andrew Brass, whose abilities with the already famed Mills target rifle were touted in papers as far as New England.  Other young men surely got their career start in Mills’ shop, including his own son Charles, though records are scant, making it difficult to know exactly how large a shop Mills had.  Only the Federal Manufacturers’ Schedules offer a more complete insight into the daily operations and the actual output of the Mills gun shop.

Ben Mills would continue to ply his trade in Harrodsburg until the close of the 1850s.  Graham sold his beloved “Springs” in 1853, and Mills accepted a lucrative and honored post as Master Armorer for the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia in October of 1858.  What should have been the pinnacle of a long and illustrious career transcended into a nightmare for Mills just one short year later when the infamous John Brown raided the facility, taking Mills and others hostage.  He didn’t realize until many years later that he had not only been a witness to history, but a participant.  Freed by Colonel (later General) Robert Edward Lee, Mills returned to Harrodsburg and his gun shop following Brown’s trial and execution.  He brought with him some prized mementos of his experiences in the form of guns and pikes used by Brown’s raiders, and was welcomed back into the community where the tales of his adventures surely found ready ears in the Mercer County locals.

Mill’s time of “recuperation” and peace was short lived with the advent of war falling quickly on the heels of Brown’s infamous raid.  There has been some inference that Benjamin Mills accepted, for a brief period following the nearby Battle of Perryville in October of 1862, a position at one or more of the Confederate arsenals, a conjecture that has been neither proven nor refuted but more likely is untrue.  Mills was definitely still in the county that fall of 1862, for his beloved daughter Lizzie met her husband-to-be during the aftermath of the battle.  Among the Confederate Army surgeons caring for the wounded was Dr. Henry Plummer, whose 1904 obituary explains that he met "Major" Mills and his family while attending as military surgeon attached to the Arkansas troops after Perryville.

His shop remained open during these war years, at least sporadically, as attested to by existing bills and receipts for repair services, though this work likely was done by the hands of shop employees and not by Mills himself, as it seems he took leave of his shop to operate a distillery in the country. 

Regardless, his sympathies were known, and an absence from the town during times of Federal occupation and martial law would explain his evasion of arrest when Michigan troops looted his shop, taking with them his prized war trophies from John Brown.  Sadly, it was just such a fate that his dear friend Graham failed to escape, being shot at, impaled by bayonet, and ultimately imprisoned by occupying Union forces.  With the cessation of hostilities following the surrender of his former savior, Robert Lee, at Appomattox Court House to General Grant, Mills most definitely was back in Harrodsburg. After his son came home from Confederate service under Morgan, the two worked together in the “Oldtown” for a few years before relocating to Lexington in nearby Fayette County sometime in 1873.  Mills would sell out and retire for good another decade later in 1883, returning to Harrodsburg where he died on August 4th, 1889.  Young Charles Mills worked on in the craft taught him by his illustrious father.

The surviving documented output of Benjamin Mills can equate to a visual timeline of his skill development and the general evolution of firearms in America.  His early years are vague to us now, with no record found to date of either his parentage or the master to whom he may have apprenticed.  What we do know is that Benjamin, for reasons now unknown, sought out the British gun making centers of Canada in which to begin his career.  There in and around Toronto he was exposed to the English “saw handle” style that he would later incorporate into his target rifles upon settling in Kentucky.  His knowledge and mechanical abilities set Mills apart from his “colleagues” in Kentucky, gaining for him a reputation that drew customers to the Bluegrass and Mills’ workshop.  His exact processes remain a mystery, his journals being lost and no detailed accounts of his shop surviving for us to understand just how Mills could so skillfully and laboriously fabricate each component of his guns, this in an era when most other “gun makers” were more likely to be assembling pre-made components rather than fashioning parts by hand.  The labor involved had to be intensive, time consuming, and costly, but such a level of direct hands-on fabrication must have been required to achieve the accuracy which set Mills’ guns apart, then and now.

In retrospect, the question could be asked as to whether the guns of Benjamin Mills were unique in the broader scope of American arms history, but the answer just isn’t so easy to conclude.  No, Mills wasn’t alone in meeting a transitioning consumer demand.  Americans of wealth were making comparable demands of similar craftsmen across the young nation as a new generation with disposable income and time were awakening to a post-Colonial freedom never before experienced.  From New York to New Orleans, America was discovering a passion for competitive sport.  The unique aspect of Benjamin Mills’ story lies not in what he did, or when, but rather in where and just how he accomplished an end product that even today impresses the savviest of gun enthusiasts.  Mills didn’t introduce the competitive shoot, to be sure, but he brought to the game a tool of such precision and accuracy in a setting that so glorified the gentlemanly skills of the shooting sport that he, along with Dr. Graham, set the mark for all those that followed.  And their influence wasn’t limited to rural Kentucky.  From what was then the middle of the burgeoning nation they impacted sports shooting forever, creating as they went along a pattern to be emulated and reputations to be envied, but never quite duplicated, much like Mills’ guns.  

Sadly, the shops and shooting ranges, along with the striking galleried edifices of “Graham Springs”, are gone, having become nothing but memories of a golden era of Southern history.  All that remains is legend and lore to document the existing weapons that changed forever the ideology of sportsmanship in America.  The spirit of Benjamin Mills, however, lives on and speaks to those who hold and cherish his prized guns produced over a 50 year career in central Kentucky.