American Civil War Muzzleloader

The rifle shown here, though not unique, is unusual for the story of its acquisition. Its former owner, Dr. Csaba Élthes, was a professional fencer born in 1912 in Csíkszereda (today: Miercurea Ciuc, Romania), whose father was an attorney and whose grandfather was the city’s former mayor. After the signing of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, Élthes’s family (finding themselves on the Romanian side of the redrawn borders) moved to Budapest. In 1933, he applied and was accepted to law school. A fencer since early youth, he joined the Hungarian university fencing team, a group with which he would go on to win the world university championships. 

In 1941, after the outbreak of the war, Élthes served six months as a lieutenant on the Russian front. Though by virtue of his law degree, he would later move to the Ministry of the Interior, he was dismissed from this position when the war ended. Following the defeat of the 1956 revolution, he left Hungary, spent eight months in a Yugoslav internment camp, and in October of 1957, gained entrance into the United States, where he soon began working as a fencing instructor. By 1959, he had become a fencing master at the New York Athletic Club (NYAC), one of the Americas’ highest-ranking sports clubs. From 1960 onward, he led the United States fencing team through eight Olympic Games. His students achieved Olympic and World Championship final placements, and in 1984, one student even won the USA’s first Olympic medal in fencing 

After moving to the New World, Élthes began collecting Native American ethnographica, an interest surviving family claim stemmed from childhood experiences: in Budapest, he and his companions had frequently played in the City Park, pretending to be Indians with young Élthes as their chief. Élthes passed away on 8 November 1995. Ultimately, his collection of more than sixty Native American ethnographic objects was left to the Museum of Ethnography by his widow, Maria Lotte Élthes, in 2023. 

Among the artefacts the museum received was this mid-19th-century muzzleloader bearing the inscription 'C. DANDOY / A. LIEGE' on the plate covering the lock mechanism. The reference is to Charles Dandoy (1807–1870), a Belgian firearms manufacturer and Liège city councillor, who in 1866, became the first general director of the Liège Firearms Factory (Manufacture Liégeoise d’Armes à Feu). It was during these decades that Liège became one of the most important firearms manufacturing centres in Europe, with Dandoy and his partners importing—among other things—the patented percussion revolvers developed by Robert Adams. By the early 1850s, Dandoy and co. had become official, licensed manufacturers of Adams revolvers in Belgium, while also producing other firearms, such as the single-shot, muzzle-loading, percussion lock rifle seen here. On this particular piece, the conspicuously short wooden forestock (the section of the stock foreward of the action) is secured to the barrel by a single metal band, with the ramrod located underneath. The rifle may have come to the New World during the American Civil War period, when, due to a general shortage of weapons, Belgian arms dealers supplied large quantities of firearms to overseas markets, in addition to domestic ones. However, this specific type of weapon was quickly made obsolete with the advent of breech-loading and repeating rifles. 

As for the rifle’s story, while the rest of the collection arrived in Hungary in late 2023, strict firearms regulations held up its transfer for years until finally, it was carried from New York to Budapest on a Hungarian Army plane in February of 2026. 

Author: György Szeljak  

Biography: www.vivomuzeum.hu 

Our special thanks to Dr. Eszter Élthes for her clarifications to the information presented here.