From Jan. 18th CNN US News.
A Tennessee woman inherited a 36-calibre Spiller & Burr revolver that had belonged to George Washington Rains.
The woman inherited it from her late father.
David Taylor, a Civil War antique dealer in Sylvania, Ohio, was going to buy it from her and had agreed on a price, but the day before he was to drive to Knoxville to get it, he found a photo of it from the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia. It was an exact match to the one stolen from the museum in 1975.
The woman is now returning it.
G.W. Rains and his older brother, Gabriel, are known as the "Bomb Brothers" for creating quite a few gunpowder weapons for the Confederacy. One was on the faculty of the USMA before the war.
The pistol is worth an estimated $50,000.
The 6-round revolver was not standard Confederate issue, one of about 1,450 made most likely in Macon, Georgia.
The brothers developed a modern process to prepare niter for gunpowder and oversaw the development of the Confederate Powder Works in Atlanta where contact fuses were developed by Gabriel. These were used in percussion mines.
The Right Thing to Do. --Old B-Runer
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