In September 1891, a New York sporting goods house named Schoverling, Daly & Gales took out a full page in Outing magazine to introduce something new. Two-thirds of the page went to Winchester gun grease and a Charles Daly hammerless shotgun. The middle block went to a rifle that had been on the market for a matter of months: the Marlin Safety Repeater, Model 1891.
Read the copy again. Marlin is not selling a beautiful rifle. Marlin is selling a serviceable one: “Side plate opened on side by a thumb screw, the parts lifted out, cleaned and replaced in less than a minute.” That was the pitch for the first lever-action rifle ever chambered for the .22 Long Rifle — a working tool with a removable wall.
Which raises an obvious question about serial number 52083. Somebody looked at that removable wall and decided it should have a stag on it.
A Rifle With a One-Year Shape
The Model 1891 was already a rare rifle before anyone cut a line into it. Roughly 18,645 were built across the model’s entire run. Of those, the side-loading first variation — the version in the Outing ad, and the version pictured above — accounts for only about 5,000 units, essentially all of them produced in 1891, with stragglers leaving the factory into late 1892.
The reason the first variation disappeared so quickly is a problem the ad never mentions. Rimfire cartridges of the period were externally lubricated, and greasy .22 cases fed through a side gate by thumb were, in practice, a nuisance. Marlin’s fix was the reversed tube magazine of the second variation, in which the outer sleeve pulls forward for loading. That change eliminated the need for a loading gate cutout in the receiver wall altogether — and with it, the entire silhouette of the first variation receiver.
So the receiver you are looking at existed as a production shape for roughly one year. Everything Marlin’s engraving department ever did to a side-loading 1891, it did inside that window. For a broader look at the model and its two variations, see our Marlin Model 1891 page.
Engraving Around the Gate
This is the photograph worth spending time with, because it shows an engraver solving a layout problem that no other Marlin presented.
On a solid-walled receiver — an 1892, an 1897, a Model 39 — the left side is an open field. The engraver places a circular game panel in the center, fills the surround with scroll, and the composition is symmetrical about the panel. On the first variation 1891, that field has two holes punched in it: the knurled thumb screw at the rear, and the rectangular loading port with its sliding cover ahead of it. Neither can be moved. Both fall exactly where the scroll wants to go.
The solution here is to push the stag panel rearward, off the geometric center of the receiver, so it clears the loading port — and then to let the scrollwork close around the thumb screw rather than pretending it isn’t there. The screw head is left plain, ringed by scroll, so it reads as a deliberate boss instead of an interruption. Above the panel, the engraving carries up onto the top of the receiver with a rosette at the center of the flat, which pulls the eye upward and off the cutouts entirely.
It is a clean piece of work, and it is the kind of thing that only shows up on a rifle whose production shape lasted a year – even later, centerfire models lacked the option to include panels on both sides, opting for scrollwork on the loading side, suggesting this may have been an early, experimental engraving by Marlin’s lead engraver, Conrad Ulrich. The dual-side panel never appeared as an option in a Marlin catalog, to the best of the author’s knowledge and available resources.
Two Panels, Not One
Marlin’s ordinary convention was one game scene. The left side of the receiver received the circular panel; the right side received scroll coverage without a panel. That is the arrangement described on the overwhelming majority of factory engraved Marlins that pass through auction, and it is what the catalog illustrations show.
SN 52083 carries a stag panel on both sides.
The two are not identical — the right-side stag stands in a slightly different attitude, and the surrounding scroll is laid out to suit its own side — but they are clearly a matched pair by one hand. Doubling the panel work is not a variation in pattern so much as a variation in quantity: it is more of the most labor-intensive element on the rifle, done twice. Whoever placed this order was not simply ticking the engraving box on a form.
The engraver was almost certainly Conrad F. Ulrich, who cut the majority of Marlin’s factory work from roughly 1881 until he left for Winchester around 1910. Ulrich learned in the shadow of L.D. Nimschke and Gustave Young, and the tight English-style scroll and finely modeled game panels on this rifle are consistent with his hand throughout the period.
Against the catalog, the scroll on SN 52083 corresponds to the lower and middle grades: dense floral coverage with scroll borders and a bordered circular center panel, but cut flat rather than in the deep relief that distinguishes the top grades. It belongs to the same pattern family that William Brophy illustrates as Marlin’s No. 1 engraving, and which Rock Island’s cataloguers routinely identify on early scroll-and-stag-panel Marlins. What the catalog cannot tell you is what the order actually cost in 1891, because the surviving Marlin extras schedules from that year do not exist in a form anyone can quote with confidence.
For scale, though: contemporary retail catalogs listed a plain Model 1891 at roughly $13 to $18 depending on the retailer, at a time when a skilled tradesman might earn $1.65 in a day. Engraving of this quality was not a rounding error on the invoice.
Decoration Without the Deluxe
Here is the detail that makes this rifle genuinely unusual, and it is a negative one: this is not a Deluxe.
Marlin’s options list for the 1891 was long — pistol grip, 26- and 28-inch barrels in octagon, round or octagon-to-round, several grades of checkering, fancy walnut, and finishes running from blue and casehardening through nickel and gold plating. The rifles that usually carry factory engraving carry most of that list with it. They are catalogued as Deluxe Model 1891s, and they have the checkered pistol grip stock to prove it.
SN 52083 has the engraving, a bright receiver finish that contrasts sharply against the blued barrel and magazine, and a buttstock with real curl in it. What it does not have is a pistol grip, and it does not have a single line of checkering. The furniture is standard-configuration: straight grip, crescent buttplate, plain forearm, 24-inch octagon barrel, half magazine, a simple bead front sight and a dovetail rear.
That combination tells you something about how Marlin’s option list actually worked in 1891. Engraving was not a package. It was a line item, and a buyer could take it without taking anything else. Somebody wanted the art and had no interest in the checkering — or, just as plausibly, had a budget and knew exactly where he wanted it spent.
What the Market Said
SN 52083 sold through Rock Island Auction Company on December 5, 2021 for $12,650.
The useful comparison is not to the wider market but to the same room on the same day. Rock Island’s Catalog 84 included several other Model 1891s:
- SN 64483 — Factory Engraved Marlin Deluxe Model 1891 — $13,800
- SN 52083 — Factory Engraved Marlin Model 1891 (this rifle) — $12,650
- SN 77224 — Special Order Marlin Deluxe Model 1891, not engraved — $6,900
A rifle with no checkering and no pistol grip came within eight percent of a full Deluxe with engraving, and brought nearly twice what a special-order Deluxe without engraving did. Widen the frame and the same picture holds: factory engraved Deluxe 1891s have realized $5,175 (SN 55097, 2019), $6,325 (SN 89893, 2018), $10,575 (SN 102162, 2023) and $35,250 (SN 55704, 2023) at the same house across recent years. SN 52083 sits in the upper half of that spread despite being, on paper, the least optioned rifle among them.
Two things are carrying that number, and neither is the wood. The first is the side-loading receiver — a first variation in a population of about 5,000, and an engraved one in a population nobody has ever managed to count. The second is the doubled game panel. Collectors pay for scarcity of configuration long before they pay for checkering.
What We Don’t Know
Marlin’s early factory records did not survive, and no letter accompanied this rifle. That means a great deal about SN 52083 is inference rather than record.
We also cannot confirm the receiver finish from photographs alone. The bright, softly frosted surface on the receiver, hammer, lever and buttplate is consistent with nickel plating, which Marlin offered — but thinning casehardening can photograph much the same way, and settling the question requires the rifle in hand rather than on a screen. Rock Island indicates that case hardening remains in protected areas in their description, so in this case we must assume the receiver was originally hardened.
Even the central claim of this article — that the engraving is factory — rests on pattern comparison rather than paperwork. As Brophy put it, the few remaining factory records do not reliably indicate whether a given gun was engraved at the factory. What can be said is that the scroll, the panel treatment and the execution are consistent with documented Marlin factory work of the period, and inconsistent with the aftermarket embellishment that turns up on Marlins of this era with some regularity.
Why This Rifle Deserves to Be Documented
The Marlin Model 1891 is the origin point. Every Marlin lever-action .22 that followed — the 1892, the 1897, the 39 and the 39A that stayed in production for the better part of a century — descends from Hepburn’s 1890 patent and the rifle Schoverling, Daly & Gales put in the middle of that Outing page.
The side-loading first variation is the first paragraph of that story, and it is a short one. About 5,000 rifles, one year of production, then a redesign that erased the shape. The engraved examples are a subset of a subset, and because the records are gone, the only census that will ever exist is the one built from rifles that surface — photographed, serial-numbered, and described honestly enough that the next person can compare against them.
SN 52083 is worth recording for a specific reason. It shows Marlin’s engraver working around a loading gate and a thumb screw, on a receiver that stopped being made almost immediately after — and it shows a buyer who wanted a stag on each side of a rifle he was perfectly content to shoulder with a plain straight grip. Neither of those things is in a catalog. They only exist in the steel.
This article is based on the auction listing and photographs for Rock Island Auction Company Catalog 84, Lot 3023 (December 2021). Photographs are used with the permission of Rock Island Auction Company. Comparable sale figures are realized prices from Rock Island Auction Company for the serial numbers cited. Engraving attribution and grade identification are based on comparison with period Marlin factory catalog illustrations and published references, and should be regarded as informed analysis rather than documentation. No factory records survive for this serial number range. Production figures for the Model 1891 and its first variation are approximate; precise records are no longer available.
Learn more: Marlin Model 1891 — Model History & Discussion | After the Guns Fell Silent: A Factory Engraved Marlin Model 39
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