Mike Combs, a Superior High School classmate of mine, shares my interest in history. Over the years, we have had many a conversation about the history of this area.
I have questions about who were the Light Guards of Superior and why. I’ve asked Google those questions and not gotten a satisfactory response but it appears Superior wasn’t the only community to have similar organizations.
The Sept. 7, 1903, issue of The Nuckolls County Herald Newspaper published at Nelson refers to what may have been a similar group of young men who held target practice at the Nuckolls County Fairgrounds.
A couple weeks ago, Mike stopped by the newspaper office with a pre-1900 book which includes a reference to Superior’s Light Guards. Apparently, the guards were teenage students, under the direction of C. E. Adams, one of Superior’s illustrious historical figures.
The late Adams, was active in the Superior business community having been a founder of at least three financial institutions and a driving force in the Superior Cattle Company. He was one of the men who established Lincoln Park.
The failure of one of his banks took much of the money made by early Superior settlers and broke the state bank deposit guarantee fund.
The June 7, 1906, issue of The Superior Express published a story about a man being elected captain of the Old Chicago Light Guards. The Light Guards were said to be the crack military company of the northwest.
In the Nov. 19, 1948, issue of The Express L. H. Bosserman wrote from Long Beach, Calif., saying he had been a member of the Superior Light Guards.
The Sept. 10 1950, issue of The Express reported the Light Guards was a miliary company, composed of boys from 10 to 14 years of age. The company was organized in 1887. They were uniformed with homemade blue jackets, pants and caps and armed with Flobert rifles, and thoroughly drilled in military tactics. Ed Adams was captain of the company. The guards had their headquarters and arsenal at the home of Mayor C. E. Adams and were under his control and discipline. Rigid discipline was exercised for the good of the company.
I didn’t know what a Flobert rifle was and asked Mike. He not only knows the answer, he has one his wife, Sharon, bought for him after they visited an eastern shop which dealt in used merchandise. Mike passed on the opportunity to buy the rifle but while he attended the business meeting that took them to that part of the country, Sharon went back to the shop and bought him a present. The Flobert rifle.
Mike’s rifle looks to be in pristine shape. He has never fired it and according to what I have learned about Floberts, he never should.
Most Flobert rifles were made in Belgian but some were produced in Germany and France. They were made in small shops, much like a cottage industry. Some shops made the entire gun, others made only parts.
They were made to handle cartridges of various calibers. All were rimfire single-shot. Some barrels were rifled, some were smooth bore.
To load a cartridge, the gun had to be cocked and there was no safety.
Floberts were generally made of soft steel and designed to sell at the lowest possible price. In 1920, when a box of 100 blackpowder .22 shots could be purchased for 21 cents, a new Flobert rifle sold for about $2.50. Tons of them were imported into the United States between 1885 and 1910.
Louis-Nicolas Flobert (1819-1894) was a French inventor who invented the first rimfire metallic cartridge in 1845. It was a major innovation in firearms ammunition as it replaced the separate bullets and powder previously used. The rimfire cartridge combined both elements in a singe metallic cartridge containing a percussion cap, powder and a bullet in a weatherproof package. Before that, a cartridge was simply a pre-measured quantity of gunpowder together with a ball which served as the bullet in a small cloth bag or rolled paper cylinder which also acted as wadding for the charge and ball.
In a booklet we reprinted in 2012 and now have for sale at The Express, Summer Miller tells of joining the Light Guards in 1888. He described the guards as a military company of 15 or 20 grade school boys.
Drilling was done on Saturday mornings on the streets adjacent to the Adams home located at Seventh and Bloom. After the drill was completed, with beating drum and colors flying while dodging horse drawn vehicles and the street sprinkler, the company might parade through the business district. The young members of the guard fancied they were U.S. Army regulars at a frontier fort or garrison out in Indian Country.
The guards marched in Memorial Day parades and at special reunions. Miller told of when the company was transported by wagon to Hardy and lived several days with Civil War veterans gathered there for a reunion.
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