Most shooters, gun shooters that is, wind up with some sort of a firearms collection. Yours may be as small as two or three old guns one of your parents handed down to you, or it may be an extensive assortment of firearms you've built yourself around a particular theme.
So it is with archery equipment as well. The sport of "modern" archery began long enough ago that early recurve and other stick bows easily qualify for the designation "antique." As some of the grand old men of archery and bowhunting are leaving the industry through either retirement or death, their early bows and accessories are taking on a great deal of value to archery shooters who treasure old things.
And why shouldn't they? After all, guns are the same way. My most prized firearm is a .410 Mossberg Model 183-D that belonged to my great-aunt. It's older than I am, but I still use it to hunt squirrels in the big woods on the back of our farm.
"A lot of it is based on nostalgia," says Frank Scott, director of the Fred Bear Museum at the Bear/Jennings Company in Gainesville, Florida. "If you look at a compound bow, it's a piece of machinery--a bunch of parts. The collecting bug really is in the traditional equipment."
The "collecting bug," as Scott puts it, hasn't hit overnight. Shooters started building collections of various types of archery equipment as long as two decades ago, and interest has increased steadily since then. Scott believes this is in part because young shooters have never used anything but compound bows, and as they develop as archers they become fascinated with the older equipment.
"Then they get hold of an old catalog, and see all the old bows in there," he says. "All of a sudden they get an itch. Some of them get real hard-nosed. They go out of their way looking for stuff, they run ads in magazines, they go to traditional archery tournaments to look for stuff."
Richard Lattimer, president of the Archery Manufacturers Organization (AMO) says it's because our sport also is maturing.
"Our sport has been in existence long enough that traditions have become established," he says. "Many of the 'elders' of archery either are getting up into their 80s or 90s or have died, and I think this has caused an awareness among all of us that we need to preserve our heritage."
But beyond their sentimental appeal, old archery equipment tells us something about ourselves as bowhunters and target shooters. Lattimer says it reflects a heritage that goes back literally thousands of years.
"One good example is the 5,000-year-old Ice Man found in the mountains between Italy and Switzerland," he says. "I attended a presentation that a scientist made about that here at the University of Florida a few months ago, and he indicated that they'd found a quiver with finished and unfinished arrows in it. The equipment was totally intact--the shafts on the arrows were even camouflaged. There was a cord in the quiver, and they couldn't figure out what the cord was. The guy was carrying a yew-wood bow that was much taller than he was, and he needed some way to string that bow. I figured out immediately that it was a bow stringer."
He says a lot of what we consider "modern" archery equipment actually has been in use for thousands of years, and discoveries such as this one increase the interest in collecting old equipment. Most people who are assembling private collections concentrate on equipment that dates back only to the early part of this century. Scott says there's a great deal of interest in one-piece bows that were built without fiberglass in the 1920s and 1930s.
Bows from this era are rare because they were made entirely of Osage orange or yew, and most haven't survived the intervening years.
"But if you can find any of those things and they're in good shape, they're very valuable," he says. "They may be worth 10 times their original retail price." Lattimer says even older material is around.
"People who have started collections have started searching the stuff out," he says. "It's got to be in attics around the country and around the world. It's stuff that's meaningless to some people, and a real treasure to us."
From time to time, Lattimer gets a call from an archer who has unearthed a piece of old equipment. He says he's not able to put a value on anything; instead, he refers callers to whichever company made the equipment. Besides private collections in the hands of individual shooters, a number of museums have holdings of various sizes. As you might expect, the Smithsonian Institution has quite a large collection. The University of Missouri also has a lot of material. But in both museums, only a small amount of the equipment is on display; most of it is in storage.
Led by AMO, a group of the sport's founders are in the process of building a new museum which will house only archery equipment. More than 20 people who feel there's a need to preserve our archery heritage have banded together to explore what must be done to create and house a lasting collection which will trace the evolution of modern archery.
The group includes such luminaries in the sport as Chuck Saunders, president of Saunders Archery, Jim Easton with Easton Aluminum, Ann and Earl Hoyt, who created Hoyt Archery who now own and Sky Archery, and Dave Staples, who is a member of the Archery Hall of Fame.
Each of the people involved with the museum-to-be brings with him or her some special expertise which will contribute to the collection's development. Though this effort is still in the "discovery" phase, Lattimer says the group already has incorporated, and he expects the facility to be located somewhere in the Midwest. This doesn't mean you should send your old bow to Lattimer at AMO yet, however. At this stage, AMO just wants to make shooters aware that a museum is under development, and that in the fairly near future it will be looking for pieces with historical significance.
"If it's a case where something is about to be destroyed, please let us know and we'll see if we can make some arrangements for it," he says. "But at this time we are not interested in purchasing or receiving old archery equipment."
Collectors are accumulating all sorts of equipment, but the one thing they most commonly want is bows, specifically stick bows. As is the case with all categories of antiques, different bows have different value. For example, one of the most "collectable" bows from Bear Archery is the Super Kodiak. But with no established values for various pieces of equipment, it's hard to know how much a bow is worth.
Scott says even a novice collector needs to be very savvy about what he or she is offering to buy. "Suppose you find a bow and someone's asking $300 for it," he says. "If you pay that for it and brings it to me and I tell you it's worth about $100, you're going to be shot out of the water. There's a lot that happens with bows that people don't think about."
For instance, if the bow has a leather grip, and the grip is sweat-stained, that drastically reduces the value of the piece. Scott worked for Fred Bear before Bear Archery existed, and has been with the company in many capacities since its beginning. Today he runs the Fred Bear Museum, which itself houses a considerable collection of antique archery equipment from all over the world.
You'd think a man with these credentials would be well able to set values on old archery gear, at least those pieces manufactured by Bear Archery. And you'd be correct. Scott says he gets several calls a day asking about old equipment. In fact, he's in the process of writing a book which will be like the Blue Book of Gun Values, but for Bear Archery equipment. By using the same sort of technique for bows as he would for guns, he's arrived at what he feels is a fair and legitimate way to establish the values of old Bear recurve bows.
"Everything starts with a new, unshot version of a bow," he says. "It's just like an unshot gun. There are no scratches, there are no sweat marks on the leather grip. The limbs are perfectly straight. You start with a value of 100 percent and go down from that. If at 100 percent this thing is worth $1,000, and it drops 2 percent, the value may drop $300. It (the value) will break at the wink of an eye. At 95 percent, it may be worth the original $500."
Scott says some of what makes a bow have a certain value is "mysterious." Some bows are more collectable than others, and what makes them collectable may be a bit of history.
For example the Super Kodiak, which we've already mentioned, was Fred Bear's favorite bow (until the take-down version the company produced). That makes it a more highly prized bow than, say, the Grizzly, even though the latter performed just as well as the Kodiak.
To determine the value of a bow, the first thing Scott needs is the name of the bow and its serial number. That tells him when and where it was made. From there, he can go back through the library of catalogs in the Museum and find the original retail price.
"Everything starts with a new, unshot version of a bow," he says. "It's just like an unshot gun. There are no scratches, there are no sweat marks on the leather grip. The limbs are perfectly straight. You start with a value of 100% and go down from that. At 95%, it may be worth the original $500."
To get an idea of what a highly collectable bow will run, let's take a look at the value of a Kodiak. The original issue price of the bow was $99.95. Taking that price as a starting point, Scott says the value of an unshot bow appreciates about 6 to 10 percent a year. So if the Kodiak you're holding in your hand was manufactured in 1965 and is fresh out of the box, it could be worth as much as $1,000.
"But by the same token, if it's badly beat up, the value goes down," Scott says. It may drop at low as just a few dollars, depending on how badly the bow was treated. In his opinion, if a bow is not worth at least the original retail price, it's not worth collecting.
Yet another consideration is whether the bow was signed by the bowmaker. For instance, Scott says Fred Bear's signature raises the value of a bow in some cases. If the bow was autographed to a particular person, it's only worth something to the person he signed it to.
"If it has just his autograph and a year on it, that's worth more than a personalized bow," he says. "But there's another factor that's hard to ignore, and that's how bad do you want it? That tells you the true value of anything. Take the Cub, for instance. It was not recognized as a top-of-the-line bow; it was a beginner's bow. Even brand new it wasn't worth more than $25 or $30. But here's a guy who's found one, and he needs one to fill a hole in his collection. To him it's worth more than it would be to someone else."
Though bows are the most commonly collected equipment, they're certainly not the only thing people collect. Some people want bow quivers, arrows, or broadheads.
In 1974, a group of broadhead collectors in Wisconsin got together to form the American Broadhead Collectors Club. If anyone can be credited with originating the idea of collecting archery equipment, it's those men. One ABCC member is Floyd Eccleston, who owns the Chippewa Archery Shop in Mount Pleasant, Michigan. Eccleston has more than 2,000 kinds of metal broadheads that were made commercially in this country. He terms what the club does more "saving" than "collecting."
"A saver saves for the value of the history," he says. "A collector collects things and sells them. We don't sell 'em. We feel that's not the right thing to do. Though sometimes I give them away."
Eccleston shows his collection of arrows and broadheads at various places around the country, including at the Pope and Young Show. Joe St. Charles, who owns Northwest Archery in Seattle, has the official Pope and Young Museum, which contains several hundred handmade English longbows, as well as numerous arrows and broadheads. Collectors often come to him for help establishing a value for all these kinds of equipment, especially for the longbows. St. Charles says the material in his collection goes back to the middle 1800s; the newest bows are from the 1960s. He says the type of material he has is hard to find.
"There's just not that much of it out there, compared to old guns," he says. "About the only way to find it is to advertise for it in local newspapers."
As we've already mentioned, Frank Scott is in the process of writing a book which will give values for old Bear Archery equipment. He says the book will go all the way back to 1933, and cover the entire time the company was located in Grayling, Michigan. It will be available in two forms, one a numbered, leather-bound collector's edition, and the other a softcover edition which will retail for about $25.
But he says the finished product won't be ready until at least 1997. So for right now, there simply are no printed resources for finding out what any piece of antique archery equipment is worth; manufacturers' suggestions or appraisal by one of the experts listed here are about your only options.
If you're interested in starting a collection, where should you look for old equipment? Almost anywhere. Since bows are not subject to the same sorts of paperwork requirements guns are, flea markets, antique stores, and yard sales all are good places to look. Gun shows are another possibility. Don't overlook the classifieds, particularly in those free sale pages that sometimes appear in the back of rural electric cooperative newsletters and county newspapers.
Copyright (c) 1995 Carolee Boyles-Sprenkel. All rights reserved.
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