We are custodians of a community’s collective memory, reflected in the artifacts that the community receives and protects. With that, the recovery of meaning derived from this collection calls for more than simply warehousing objects. Some objects from the more remote past are nearly mute. The longest flintlock gun, which is in a collection of 18th-century French trade guns at the Historical Society of Greenfield, is such an object. Now but a shadow of its former appearance, this artifact holds the memory of the great 17th- and 18th-century conflict among America’s native people and Europeans for control of this continent.

That flintlock gun, manufactured in France in the mid-1700s in exchange for rich Canadian furs, was one among many binding Native Americans in Quebec to an alliance with France for generations.

By the mid-1600s, in the vast regions of French North America, firearms had become an essential part of survival for both Natives and Europeans. Before long, in response to Iroquois raids in the St. Lawrence valley, French-allied Canadian Natives armed with French guns and firearms became an essential component in the fur trade. For these reasons, French authorities and private merchants would be compelled to purchase large quantities of firearms in France to supply the Natives living in the French colonies of North America.

Manufactured in the city of Saint-Etienne, located in the Loire region of east-central France, the gun in the historical society’s collection is engraved “Thiolliere Freres,” that is, Thiolliere Brothers. Beginning about 1720, the Thiolliere family of gunsmiths and armorers were one of the major suppliers of guns to the fur trade in New France, a region that reached from the Arctic south down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. By 1745 to 1759, the period during which this gun was manufactured and delivered to New France, the third generation of the family was active, likely the brothers Pierre-Antoine and Pierre-Andre Thiolliere.

The fall of New France to the British after 1759 ended the French role in America.

It is the goal of a presentation on this topic, to be held at the Historical Society of Greenfield on Church Street, Oct 17 at 7 p.m., to help open a window on this rare survival. Few public collections in New England have one. In its time, such a flintlock long gun was a valued asset for its owner. This particular gun is one of the more expensive examples, too, costing nearly twice what an ordinary trade gun cost. New Englanders, also, found such guns to be exceptional, especially when compared to the poorer guns they typically had access to at home. By the mid-1700s, numbers of Massachusetts gunsmiths, in fact, began producing copies of these guns. After the fall of Quebec in 1759, with the increased availability of French trade gun parts and complete weapons, gunsmiths in central and western Massachusetts produced well- crafted copies of the then older-style French trade gun to such an extent that the New England copy is now known among collectors as the “New England fowler.”

Historian Richard Colton’s talk will be the society’s last presentation of the year. The Historical Society of Greenfield can be reached at 413-774-3663.

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