The Other Lever Gun Company
When most American shooters think of lever-action rifles, they think of Winchester. That’s understandable; Winchester has been famous for lever guns for a century-and-a-half. But there’s another lever-gun company that is very nearly as famous and has very nearly as storied a history – and who has made some great guns, besides. They didn’t get as much movie screen time as Winchester, but these rifles were also well-represented in the old West; They also still see use in game fields and on target ranges, as well as in informal plinking, all over the United States today.
And it all started with a man named Marlin.
John Mahlon Marlin
John Marlin was born in Boston Neck, Connecticut, in 1836, around the same time Sam Colt was in New Jersey, beginning the manufacture of his Paterson revolvers. That’s an interesting coincidence because while we don’t know a lot about the life of the young John Marlin, we do know that he showed up in 1863 at the Colt factory in New Haven, Connecticut, where he worked on making Colt revolvers. That knowledge would serve him well after the war when he started his own company. In 1872, the Marlin Fire Arms Company opened for business, initially building single-shot rifles, then in 1881, introducing their first lever-action rifle.
John Mahlon Marlin died in 1901, passing the company on to his sons, Mahlon Henry and John Howard. And the guns old Marlin and his sons built are the real story.
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The Guns
Marlin made a lot of guns through the years, some winners, some… not. One of their first lever guns was the Model 1881, which was introduced to compete with Winchester’s 1876 Centennial as a big-bore repeater. But while Winchester’s 1876 rifle used proprietary cartridges, the Marlin used rounds already in broad use, like the .38-55 and the .45-70. The 1881 was a solid, powerful rifle, but Marlin’s first shot at immortality came a few years later with the introduction of the Model 1893. This gun, with the traditional Marlin side ejection port and flush bolt, would later morph into the Model 36 and then, in 1948, to the Model 336. Here, Marlin had a winner – a solid, steel-frame, side ejection gun in, among other calibers, the wildly popular .30 WCF, or .30-30.
The timing was good; in the post-World War 2 world, scopes were becoming more popular, and the Marlin with its flat-top receiver was ready-made for scope mounts, unlike the top-ejection Winchesters that required a side mount that put the scope out of the preferred vertical mount above the bore.
The 336 gave rise to several other great lever guns, including the Model 444 in the proprietary .444 Marlin cartridge and the great big-bore Model 1895, chambered, like the Model 1881 before it, for rounds like the .45-70.
A year after the 1893 was introduced, Marlin also brought out a smaller, lighter version, the Model 1894, a pistol-caliber lever gun that is still in production today, having changed very little from its original form.
Marlin made some famous rimfire rifles as well. One is the Golden 39A, a graceful, side-ejecting lever gun chambered for the .22 long rifle. While the 39A was a higher-grade gun, on the expensive side for a rimfire rifle, in 1960, Marlin brought out the Model 60, a tubular-magazine-fed .22 long rifle piece that may be the best-selling long gun in history, with over 11 million built to date.
If you are my age or younger and have been involved in the shooting sports, you likely either owned a Model 60 or knew someone who did. And it’s not just the Model 60; Marlin made many autoloading rimfire rifles on the Model 60 action. Some years ago, I had a Model 99 M1, a short-barreled Model 60, in essence, with a wooden handguard atop the barrel to make it look like the famous WW2 M-1 Carbine. There were a lot of variations on that theme.
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Many more guns came out of New Haven: the Model 780-series of rimfire built guns, which included two chambers in the .22 WMR, that being the box-magazine-fed 782 and the tubular magazine-fed Model 783. Marlin even dabbled in bolt-action big game rifles, with the Model XS7 short-action and the XL7 long-action.
Marlin also built side-by-side shotguns under the L.C. Smith name, having purchased rights to the brand from Hunter Arms in 1945. Early on, they also dabbled in revolvers, making, among others, the now-rare “Little Joker” and “Tip Up 1878” rimfire revolvers.
The company has made a lot of guns through the years, and throughout their various iterations and ownership structures, the company seems to follow the same strategy of rewarding success and abandoning failures; if a gun didn’t sell, they dropped it; if it did well, they left well enough alone, didn’t mess around with the design, and just kept building it. The one exception was a piece of lawyerly pettifoggery added to their lever guns, that being a sliding crossbolt hammer-block safety at the rear of the receiver, as though a gun with an external hammer needs an additional safety. But those seem to be the times we live in.
The Rifling
There was one other odd exception to the “don’t mess around with the design” philosophy. In 1953, Marlin patented what the company called “Micro-Groove Rifling,” which was intended to make barrels faster and easier to produce. Instead of standard rifling with five or six cut grooves, the new Marlin system was button-rifled with five narrow, shallow grooves for each 1/10 of an inch of bore diameter, meaning a .30-caliber barrel had 15 grooves. The system produced mixed results. With factory ammo, it worked all right, but if you handloaded with lead bullets, you ran into the problem that the large number of shallow grooves acted as though the bore size was increased slightly. This caused accuracy problems and required an oversized slug to gain back the accuracy. I have two Marlins with this system, a .22 WMR and a .30-30, and both work fine with jacketed bullets. I have run cast bullets through the .30-30, and, yes, I have to agree, accuracy is not the best. Nowadays, I load the Hornaday 160-grain LeverRevolution pills in my .30 WCF loads, and I have to say, they aren’t cheap, but they work great.
Today
Marlin has been through some interesting times, business-wise.
In 2000, Marlin acquired the H&R 1871 gun company. This company, based in Massachusetts, made primarily low-cost single-shot rifles and shotguns. These were marketed under the brand names of Harrington & Richardson and New England Firearms.
But in 2007, Marlin was purchased itself, by none other than Big Green – the Remington Arms company. The company closed Marlin’s plant in New Haven, Connecticut, and the manufacture of Marlin guns moved to several Remington plants.
Then, in 2020, with Remington undergoing bankruptcy, the Marlin product line was purchased by Ruger, where it remains today. And I must say, I was happy to see that Ruger has brought back the beloved Marlin gold trigger and the bullseye on the bottom of the stock. That’s a nice touch – but they kept that safety!
Full disclosure: I have a few Marlins here in the safe. One is a Model 783, a .22 WMR bolt gun, that I bought the summer I was 14 with money made detassling corn and haying. I cut quite a swath through the local crows and groundhogs with that rifle, and it still shoots great. Another is a 1979-vintage Model 336 in the venerable .30 WCF (.30-30), which may be one of the best woods rifles for deer ever made, right up there with the 1894 Winchester. That 336 is my “keep handy” rifle here at the homestead in case a black bear wanders onto the property.
Finally, I have an 1895G, the first iteration of the Guide Gun, a 20”-barreled .45-70 lever gun, a short-range thumper ideally suited for thick willow brush that may be hiding a moose – or a grizzly. All of my guns were made by Marlin when it was still the original Marlin, although I do hear good things about the guns since Ruger took over.
Marlin’s a classic American gun story. Like another family-started business, Mossberg, they made not the fanciest guns or the flashiest guns, just good, solid, established shooting irons that didn’t change a lot over time because there was no reason for them to. They worked, and some have been around for over a century and still work. One of mine has been in my hands for half a century, and is still as good as new. That’s a good record by any measure.
