HARTFORD, Conn. — It was 1971. Thomas Meskill was governor.
Gas cost about $0.36 a gallon.
And that was the last time the 1847 Colt Whitneyville-Walker revolver, made by Hartford gunmaker Samuel Colt, was seen in the Museum of Connecticut History at the State Library.
Now after a multi-year, multi state investigation, the pistol has been returned and a Delaware man has been sentenced in a case that involved a variety of stolen historic weapons.
Investigators started with a tip in 2009 about some weapons stolen from the Valley Forge Historical Society. Two detectives from Upper Merion Township, Pennsylvania followed the trail and found that the Valley Forge crime was related to thefts that occurred in 16 other organizations spanning five states between 1968 and 1979. The suspect lived in Delaware, and that's when the the FBI’s Art Crime Team got involved.
Six years ago, FBI agents served a search warrant at the home of Michael Corbett in Newark, Delaware and found a variety of stolen historic weapons, but not the ones that had spurred the investigation. In December 2021, Corbett was indicted by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania for possession of firearms and other items stolen from museums in the 1970s. Last August, Corbett pleaded guilty to the possession of stolen items transported interstate and was sentenced to a one-day prison sentence, 14 months of house arrest, and a $65,000 fine as part of a plea deal.
As part of the plea deal, Corbett turned over additional stolen firearms to which he had access – including a Colt Whitneyville-Walker revolver that was stolen from the Museum of Connecticut History back in 1971.
The pistol is historically significant as it was manufactured for use in the Mexican-American war and used by Texas Ranger Samuel Walker. Walker had used an earlier Colt revolver in combat and was pleased with the results, believing, with some improvements, that Colt’s Paterson revolver “…can be rendered the most perfect weapon in the world.”
Colt worked with Walker and Eli Whitney Jr. to perfect the pistol. One thousand pistols were made, 239 were defective when first used as the cylinders burst. About 150 pistols are known to currently exist.
The Museum of Connecticut History’s Colt Whitneyville-Walker was donated in 1957 as part of a collection from the Arthur L. Ulrich Museum, which was the original Colt Factory Collection formed by Colonel Samuel Colt himself.
The Connecticut State Library’s Museum of Connecticut History was one of 16 organizations that had weapons returned last Monday in a ceremony hosted by the FBI’s Art Crime Team at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia.
Other items returned were an 1842 single-shot percussion cap “pattern” pistol made and provided to contractors, stolen from Massachusetts’s Springfield Armory on the same day back in 1971; a French and Indian War-era powder horn stolen from a Belchertown Historical Society in Massachusetts; an 1847 Mississippi rifle stolen from the Mississippi Department of Archives & History; a World War II battlefield pickup pistol belonging to General Omar Bradley, stolen from the U.S. Army War College Museum; a number of 18th-century English and Scottish pistols stolen from Pennsylvania’s Valley Forge Historical Society Museum; and a plethora of 19th-century Pennsylvania rifles, stolen from various Pennsylvania museums.
Doug Stewart is the Senior Digital Content Producer at FOX61 News. He can be reached at dstewart@fox61.com.
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