A fairly mundane subject, but how do you know what type of flint your flintlock should have depending on the era of your gun?
On the morning of April 19, 1775 about 450 Provincial minute and militia men met on a field above the North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. Three companies of British light infantry sat just below them holding the bridge and ground around it. Flame and smoke rising from the town caused the Provincial men to march down to the bridge. Flash forward to 1934 when an avocational archaeologist, Benjamin Lincoln Smith was looking for Native American artifacts in a freshly plowed field. It had rained the night before and he soon started to see on the ground gun flints everywhere. He stated, “they stood out against the dark, wet ground like glittering jewels” and he soon found almost 100 flints in two long lines. Knowing the history of the area, he realized their importance. These had been changed out of Provincial muskets and fowlers and dropped minutes before they marched down to the North Bridge and fired on British soldiers. I used to see some of these flints when I was a kid glued to pasteboard at the local pharmacy and other locations around town. Luckily, most of them found a home at the Concord Museum where they can be seen today. A study revealed that they are all of English origin of a form called a spall because of their shape. That form of flint can be dated to the mid-to-late 18th century and there are a variety of sizes to fit the locks of many different types of weapons.
By 1777, massive amounts of French goods were being shipped to North America, including thousands of muskets and barrels of flints. The French had devised a way to knap their flints in a better way, in a blade or flake form. They are also an opaque light brown with the English being gray to almost black. The English were trying to perfect the blade form of knapping but had not done so till around the outbreak of the war. These black blade form of English flints did not start to arrive here till the late 18th and early 19th century.
Today we can purchase English blade/flake flints on many internet sites for our flintlocks, but for those who truly want to have the correct flint for their gun, why not find the correct form for the date of your gun?
