Marlin No. 47

Frank Kenna bought Marlin for $100 in 1924. The purchase price included over $100,000 in debt, But Mr. Kenna was nothing if not a persistently enterprising individual, and made the marketing decision to offer a free firearm to individuals who purchased four shares of stock at $25 per share. At a point when Marlin’s flagship Model 39 sold for under $26, spending four-times the price of a rifle to buy stock wasn’t a decision made for a free gun – it was a vote of confidence in a historic brand.

The stock option promotion was far from Kenna’s only marketing innovation: in 1928 it was announced in trade publications that Marlin had agreed to advertise its firearms on the WMSG radio station – a sporting-events radio station headquarters in New York’s Madison Square Garden. At the time it was considered to be the first firearms manufacturer to advertise on the radio waves.

It has been widely accepted that the Model 47 was only available as a ‘stock option’ rifle. This appears to be largely based on LtCol William Brophy’s assertion that “it was not a catalog featured rifle…[but] offered free with the purchase of four shares of Marlin preferred stock.” This is largely based on the premise that the Marlin was not featured in Marlin’s own catalogs It was, however, featured in at least some consumer catalogs.

The No. 47 was largely a parts-bin model, being nearly identical to the Model 29 and the contemporarily produced No. 37, but featured a checkered stock and fore end. Its most unique feature, however, was the unique case-hardening process: earlier Marlin rifles had been color case hardened with the traditional bone-charcoal method, but the No. 47 was case hardened using a cyanide bath method whereby the heated receiver was dunked, slowly, into molten cyanide. This produced a tiger-stripe pattern unique to the Model 47. This method was not a Marlin innovation – it was also used by Stevens, Parker, and Fox, amongst others, but appears to be the only Marlin model finished in this manner.

The original production run is is believed to span a serial number range of less than 3,800, though the quantity produced run was like smaller, since Marlin serialized rifles sequentially, rather than by model. Available by at least 1928, the No. 47, alongside the more widely available No. 37, was discontinued by at least 1931.