Rock Island Auction is proud and privileged to unveil a new discovery in the field of fine and historic Winchester collecting: The Marshfield Find. This nearly perfectly preserved Model 1886 rifle is truly an “out of the crate” discovery that will be celebrated for years to come and immortalized in future publications. It is a story that celebrates the Winchester legacy and one family’s nearly 140 year curatorship. Named after the salt marshes that border the early Pilgrim town, Marshfield, Massachusetts, sits where Cape Cod Bay meets Massachusetts Bay and is where our story begins. Up on “Big Hill” sat a colonial era home built circa 1660 by John Rogers who received a land grant from the King of England. In the “History of Marshfield” the home was described as a “’block house,’ built in Pilgrim days with a view to protect themselves from the Indians. A portion of the top of the house projected over the main body, and had port holes in it, so that they could fire down upon the Indians if attacked.” Over the years additions were added to the home, and the old walls from the days of King Philip’s War were incorporated into the first floor parlor. In 1872, the home and the surrounding 200 acre farm was purchased by Henry W. Nelson. The Nelson farm was a large establishment. There were horses, Holstein cattle, pigs, and chickens. An apple orchard overlooked the North River. Large greenhouses facilitated the growth of a wide variety of cash crops such as the Marshall strawberry known for its delicious taste. An irrigation system was installed that pumped water from a brook. A labor force of fifty full time employees was employed. The Nelson farm marked a turning point in American agriculture. In 1800, the average American farm was about 10 acres and produced enough food for one family. By the turn of the century the average American farm covered 150 acres and raised large quantities of crops and livestock sold for cash. The Nelson farm was at the dawning of an agricultural revolution that gave way to the agribusiness of today. Upon his death in 1897, Henry Nelson passed the farm to his son, Episcopal Reverend Henry W. Nelson, Jr. Rev. Nelson was a Doctor of Divinity and by 1876 had become the rector of Trinity Church, Geneva, New York, where he remained until 1901 when blindness due to cataracts forced him to retire. He wore cobalt lenses in his glasses in an effort to help his vision. In retirement he gained an interest in the financial markets. He passed away in 1928 as a wealthy man. According to family accounts Rev. Nelson was a “character.” His blindness had caused him to use a wicker wheelchair for assistance, but not one to let his disability bring him down, the reverend preferred to cause a little mischief. One of his go to pranks was to roll down “Big Hill” in the wheelchair yelling out to his wife as if he had lost control. Family stories portrayed Rev. Nelson as a man with little to no interest in firearms, but nevertheless, have him as the purchaser of the rifle. He was not a trophy hunter, recalled the family. There were no animal heads on the wall. No taxidermy sitting in the corner. So when Rev. Nelson’s Winchester Model 1886 in .45-90 WCF was discovered in the attic of the family home up on “Big Hill” in the 1970s, it was a big shock to his descendants. “He must have gotten a quirk and got it,” became the only logical answer. In ordering a rifle in .45-90 WCF the reverend was certainly not looking to shoot tin cans off a split rail fence. The .45-90 WCF cartridge meant business and was more than capable of stopping even the most dangerous North American game. In Massachusetts wolves and mountain lions had mostly been eliminated in the state by the mid-1800s and populations of coyotes, black bears, and bobcats roamed the landscape as they continue to do today. When this rifle was manufactured during the model’s debut year of 1886 the Nelson family was well settled on the farm. Given the rifle’s unbelievable condition its likely the crate was never opened by its original owner, and was persevered in its original crate with its original accessories and packing paper and tucked away in the attic of the Nelson home to be completely forgotten for nearly 90 years. The farm passed to two of the reverend’s daughters, Margaret and Dorothea. The two siblings donated 133 acres of the farm to the New England Forestry Foundation and today those acres make up the Nelson Memorial Forest where hikers find adventure on 3 miles of trails and can even discover the remnants of the water pump system that irrigated the Nelson farm. The house and the remaining acres continued to be owned by Nelson family descendants until 1977. Margaret and Dorothea never married. For a time Margaret lived in Boston where she was the caregiver to her cousin Annie Nelson who lost her mother at birth and her father six years later. After Annie married in 1913, Margaret returned to Marshfield to live with her parents until their deaths and her sister Dorothea. She remained at the family home until her death in 1945. Dorothea returned to the family estate after her father retired from Trinity Church. Each summer during the post-war years Dorothea hosted the families of her sister Mary and cousin Annie including their grandchildren at the old home. One of those children was Margaret, daughter to Mary and Edward Pierce. In time, Margaret and her husband Frederic Milholland inherited the home on “Big Hill.” The couple had a daughter, Jean, who never forgot the cows on the farm. Jean went on to marry and have a family of her own, and in 1963 went westward as countless Northeasterners had done over a century ago to find fame and fortune. Living in California, the east coast family that had moved west always found the time to travel back to the old Nelson farm each summer to reunite with family. On one of those summer trips, around 1974, Jean’s two sons found something wondrous hiding in the attic. For young boys nothing could have been better than treasure hunting in Grandma and Grandpa Milholland’s attic. It was a spacious attic with lots of headroom and crammed with curiosities like beaver skin top hats and fur muffs that made up their grandfather’s antique business. One of the brothers spied a rather unassuming crate. “What’s in the box?” he asked his grandparents. They did’t know. The crate was marked with the name H.W. Nelson, an unmistakable sign that it was family property. The crate was sealed. To see what was in the crate the boys’ grandfather removed the nails one by one that secured the lid. Heart rates quickened in anticipation with each pull of the nail. They were on the verge of a sensational discovery. Pulling back the lid exposed an untouched time capsule from 1886. For gun collectors this was one of those Howard Carter moments. Asked if he could see anything as he peered for the first time through a small hole in the door to King Tutankhamen’s tomb in the Valley of Kings, British Egyptologist Howard Cater responded with his famous words, “Yes, wonderful things!” Carter had unearthed the best preserved Egyptian pharaoh tomb to date. In a home in Marshfield two boys and their grandparents had their own moment of discovering “wonderful things.” For nearly 90 years Henry Nelson’s crate sat undisturbed and forgotten in an attic of a home that dated back some 30 years prior to the Salem witch trials. During those decades the world around it continued on. The house welcomed and passed through several generations of Nelsons. Sixteen U.S. Presidents came and went. Stock markets rose and crashed. Two world wars exploded and a cold war simmered. Through all of this and more, Nelson’s crate did nothing more than sit quietly in the safety of the old Nelson home, waiting for a time to be reintroduced to the world, which came in the summer of 1974. When the lid was finally removed, 87 years after being delivered new from the factory, the crate exposed a Winchester Model 1886 rifle in a lightly tooled leather scabbard, so its true beauty remained hidden a few moments longer until it was unholstered. No longer in the darkness, the rifle displayed all of its glory, perfectly preserved. This is how it left the factory: neatly packed in the wooden crate with its scabbard and boxes of ammunition! The Winchester .45-90 WCF boxes of ammunition feature a green label marked “Cartridges for Model 1886” along with an illustration of a bullet. As for the crate, the lid is boldly marked with the name “H.W. Nelson” along with "BOSTON/MASS/C/O Meredith K Nelson/4 Exchange Place" and has an Adams Express Company paper label. A few of the original nails removed by Frederic Milholland remain. The crate continues to carry the original packing material: a combination of standard period packing sheets of paper and wadded up section from the want ads from a period newspaper. So, what does a family do after they come across a find of the century? In this case, the young boys immediately paraded the rifle around the house and took their photos with it. The rifle and its contents were taken to a local appraiser who proved he knew what he was looking at. It appraised at $20,000 and based on inflation is around $135,000 in today’s money. The family remembers the appraiser having the rifle for a long time and having to ask for it to be returned. The appraiser removed the black powder from the cartridges out of caution. In 1977, the house on the “Big Hill” was sold. The rifle and its crate traveled with Margaret and her husband Frederic Milholland to Princeton, New Jersey and then later to California. As a model of rifle intended for frontier use, this rifle had finally made it out West. Better late than never! In time, the rifle was passed on to their daughter Jean where it once again took safe residency in an attic. After Jean’s death ownership fell to her children. For nearly 140 years, the rifle was cared for by the descendants of the original owner Rev. Henry Nelson, and now, in 2024, it is presented to the world for the first time so that a new family can carry on its legacy. A notarized letter of provenance from one of Jean’s sons is included along with two digital images of the Nelson family. The powerful Winchester Model 1886 is by far one of the most iconic lever action rifles of all time and remains popular with collectors, shooters, and hunters to this day as one of the strongest lever action designs ever developed. This rugged and dependable rifle was invented by prolific firearms inventor John Moses Browning and was his first repeating rifle design to enter production but was far from his last. Browning's design was tweaked for production by none other than William Mason of Colt Single Action Army fame. The Model 1886 kept Winchester at the top of the lever action market. While a shorter action than the Model 1876, the Model 1886 was able to chamber longer cartridges, including the .45-70 Government, and its stronger locking block design was able to handle higher pressures even as Winchester made the jump to smokeless powders. The locking bolts on the '86 pass vertically through the bolt securing it firmly in place, and the design was also sleeker by abandoning dust covers and switching to an internal cartridge elevator. A powerful, dependable rifle was highly valued in the American West in the late 19th century, and remained desirable for hunters through the 20th century and on to today. Among its fans in the period was Theodore Roosevelt, who used this model extensively, including testing samples for the famous Smithsonian–Roosevelt African Expedition, and the legendary Rough Rider leader also presented Model 1886s to his friends. The Model 1886 was manufactured from 1886 to 1935, and the production total reached just under 160,000, but surviving examples in exceptionally high condition are rarely encountered. The '86 was a "working man's gun" and thus surviving examples typically display all the character of hard use. Roosevelt used one of his rifles so much that it was sent back to the factory multiple times for repairs. This rifle is in truly extraordinary, nearly unbelievable near new condition and has all the fantastic appearance of just coming off the production line, and has the desirable and stunning vivid color casehardened frame and furniture. It provides a very rare glimpse at what a Model 1886 would have looked like fresh from the factory. It is certainly worthy of the finest public or private collection. Its condition is made even more extraordinary when you consider that the rifle was manufactured in 1886, the model’s introductory year. The accompanying factory letter indicates that the serial number was applied on November 30, 1886 and the rifle was received in the warehouse on December 6, 1886 and shipped on March 4, 1887. The factory letter also confirms the octagon barrel in .45-90 caliber and plain trigger. The rifle is fitted with a dovetail blade front sight and an elevation adjustable rear sight. The top barrel flat is stamped with the two-line Winchester New Haven address ahead of the rear sight and “45-90 W.C.F.” at the breech. The upper tang is stamped “-MODEL 1886-.” The lower tang has the two-line patent dates marking and the first year serial number. The forearm and straight grip stock are plain varnished walnut, and the stock is fitted with a crescent buttplate. Provenance: Reverend Henry W. Nelson, Jr. and his descendants

Mint as a well preserved time capsule from 1886. The Marshfield Find will be impossible to improve upon. Its phenomenal condition, its original shipping crate containing the original scabbard, boxes of ammunition and packing material, and its family curatorship make it a one-of-a-kind Winchester discovery well worthy of the finest public or private collection. This extraordinary Winchester Model 1886 will be talked about for decades to come!