What information is found in the shipping ledgers?
     Courtesy of Tom Archer

Ledger pages, and the information contained therein, can vary depending upon the production period in which a gun was manufactured.
 
The page columns are usually headed as follows: Serial Number, Type, Grade, Length, Order Number, Date Finished, Date Shipped, and Purchaser.

Serial Number: at the top of each page was listed the full serial number that had been assigned to the first frame entered into the ledger on that page; afterwards factory "shorthand" would only list the last two serial number digits until such time as a new ledger page was begun, or the one-hundred block was reached. Using this procedure, the only portion of the serial number entered for this gun was the last two digits "89"; but if we look up to the top of the page, we can decipher the full serial number which is "75089" (the next complete serial number to be recorded would be 75100, with the next full number heading afterwards at the top of the following ledger page).

Type: the heading "Type" refers only to the frame, of which Hunter was producing three unique types of the Smith frame; the Featherweight (FW), the Regular (R), and the Hammer (H'mer). FW, R, and H'mer are the abbreviation codes seen on the ledger page. In earlier production periods guns with different frame types, and guns with ejectors were assigned unique serial number series, or "blocks"; but during this production period, all frame types were comingled, making  research efforts much more difficult and time consuming.

Grade: For this period, reflects true grade offering available regardless of frame type.  

Gauge: 12-bore.

Length: Length of the barrel set the gun sported when originally shipped (28" in this example). If the gun had shipped with multiple barrel sets, this block would record the length of each barrel.

Order Number: All guns produced were manufactured based on a customer order number. If only one gun was ordered, that gun was assigned an order number; but if a customer ordered multiple guns, there was still only one order number assigned, and each individual gun produced under that order would be assigned the same order number.

Date Finished/Date Shipped: Those dates were often the same day on customer ordered guns, but guns with standard specs were sometimes built under factory order numbers and stored in company inventory awaiting a customer order; in those cases one will find varying finish and ship dates.

Purchaser: this is the last ledger column and was usually the name of the sporting goods dealer or hardware store that ordered the gun; but could also be a private individual. Most individuals, however simply placed their order thru a hardware or sporting goods dealer authorized to sell Smith guns.