John Sites - Gunsmith
No. 39
October 15th, 1939
John Sites - Gunsmith
Mr. J. P. Booker, Lamine, to who the Society is indebted for many donations of Indian relics and historical information, remembers Uncle Johnny Sites, early-day gunsmith of Boonville and Arrow Rock, who was still living when Mr. Booker was a young man.
Sites was living in Boonville as early as 1837 (although family tradition has claimed he did not move there before the early forties) for in that year he mended David Barton's pistols. He seems to have made guns and pistols in Boonville but later, when living in Arrow Rock during the time Mr. Booker knew him, made only the wooden stocks for ready-made barrels. Mr. Sites married Nannie Toole, according to Mr. Booker, died without children and is buried in the Arrow Rock cemetery. His brother, Ches Sites, was a farmer living near Lamine.
"Once Uncle Johnny and I were talking about old Mr. Poindexter who lived in the bottom," Mr. Booker recounts, and I mentioned that he was so spry he could jump over a rail fence.
"Well, Uncle Johnny- who was nearly eighty years old then- stuttered, "S-S-s-so c-c-could I."
"Uncle Johnny couldn't read or write but he was a very religious man and always had a Bible Handy. Once he lent me his Bible to read and when I returned it I said, >uncle Johnny give me one of your guns?"
"N-no I c-c-can't do that," he said.
"Well doesn't the Bible say that if you have two coats that you should give one to your neighbor also?"
"Y-y-yes but it don't say guns," he replied.
Uplinked 03/22/01