Welcome to today’s Photo of the Day! Back to our regularly scheduled Henry/Winchester repeater story. Here we have a Winchester 1866 Centerfire “Yellow Boy”, as they were later referred, chambered for a centerfire cartridge. In the mid to late 1860s metallic cartridges, were already the new norm but centerfire was only beginning to take hold. Up until then, there were so many different types of self-contained cartridges like pinfire, teatfire, rimfire, etc. Today centerfire is the standard practice and in the late 1860s Winchester got on board and modernized their Winchester 1866 to use the centerfire technology and drop the Henry lineage; at least in the form of the 44 Henry Rimfire cartridge.
“This is a solid example of a Winchester Model 1866 Lever Action Rifle that was manufactured in 1882. This rifle has the age appearance that you see with an “attic find” rifle. The Model 1866 Winchester Rifle was essentially a Henry Rifle with improvements invented and patented by Winchester’s shop superintendent Nelson King in 1866. The modified magazine with the side loading gate and new walnut forearm eliminated the primary defects in the Henry rifle and created a lever action rifle that has been associated with the name “Winchester”, and the opening of the Western frontier.”
Lot 3012: Winchester Third Model 1866 Lever Action Rifle. (n.d.). Rock Island Auction Company. . photograph. Retrieved January 29, 2023, from https://www.rockislandauction.com/detail/56/3012/winchester-third-model-1866-lever-action-rifle.
