The Rifle Behind The Wall…

(February 2020) ….One morning while I was at work in late February, our architect/construction manager texted me this picture and said “we found a BB gun in the garage — we left it propped up on the wall for you.”

One look at the picture told me right away this was no BB gun — the hammer, loading tube, and hexagonal barrel gave that away — it was likely an old .22 rifle. I was curious as to exactly where it was found in the garage, since we’d cleaned it out entirely before deconstruction began.

“Where did you guys find it?” I asked.

“Behind the garage wall, sitting on the foundation ledge,” he replied.

I paused for a second.

“Behind the garage wall? Isn’t that the downstairs bathroom?” It didn’t make any sense. “But that’s a shared wall with the bathroom, right?”

“Nope,” he said. “There is a void space between the bathroom wall and the garage wall and when we opened the garage wall, the gun was sitting right on the foundation ledge.”

A void space.

I thought I knew the layout of 631 North Drury Lane as well as anyone living there for the last 20 years would have, and I couldn’t picture in my mind where that void space was and how a rifle could have been placed there.

I couldn’t wait to stop by the construction site on the way home…

(This was taken just a few days ago in July, but back in February, it marked the spot on the lower garage wall where the rifle had been found behind the wall’s studs.)

Later after work, I pulled up in front of the house and made my way up the driveway eager to open the garage door to see where the rifle had been found.

“Well, look at that…” I said to myself. “So they never built the bathroom directly against the foundation wall.”

I figured there had to be an architectural explanation for doing so, but it seemed strange to leave a space there.

Then it struck me that this gap would also run into the utility room, but I never remembered any such gap, because for sure, the utility room wall and the garage wall were shared…

Before deconstruction (left), this corner of the utility room had an orange cabinet on the foundation wall and a set of orange shelves on the right.

After deconstruction (right), we saw there was a vertical post behind the corner where the cabinet/shelves met. The post’s width partially blocks the gap, limiting access to the void space. The cabinet’s/shelves’ placement are why I never noticed (or even suspected) there’d be a gap there in the first place.

However, the rifle wasn’t found just behind the post — it was found at least 6’ beyond the post behind the cabinet/shelves, well beyond arm’s reach.

Certainly, the rifle had to have been placed in that gap prior to the cabinet and shelves being installed. There was also no evidence of construction/remodeling for the garage walls on the other side of the utility room, which means the rifle had been sitting there on the foundation ledge for 56 years after the house was built in 1964.

I brought the rifle up the street to our rental home into some decent lighting and started examining it for details.

First off, it was definitely a .22 — I’d shot my dad’s Winchester Model 62 hundreds of times in Virginia — and this looked very similar.

Just a few minutes later, it revealed itself to be a Winchester Model 1890, but there was plenty of wiggle room for determining its exact year.

That was revealed by the serial number printed on the bottom of the stock: 154206.

A few searches later revealed that this rifle’s serial number falls between 153251 and 185606, which puts its manufacturing date at 1903.

This was a 117 year-old rifle.

This rifle was one of the first 1,000 Model 1890s Winchester manufactured in 1903, out of 32,354 total for that year.

The Model 1890 was a takedown model, meaning the screw in the receiver allowed one to take the stock off.

The slide action worked as smoothly as the last time it had been operated probably 56 years ago. No corrosion on the inside.

But who last operated its slide action? And why was it sitting on a foundation ledge of a void space that couldn’t be accessed?

My pet theory is that it was potentially part of a crime back in 1964.

The story goes like this:

A murder takes place in Chicago using this rifle and then orders are issued to “lose it somewhere out in the suburbs” so that it would never be found. One guy knows another guy working on a housing development in Arlington Heights and arranges to have him place the rifle in the void space and then build the garage wall and the support pole blocking any access to the space.

Anyway, my plan is to restore it to its original condition. It’s worth ~$1,500-$2,000, depending on the appraisal website consulted.

What a treasure!