The Bannerman family decided to sell Bannerman’s Island tot he state of New York in the 1950s, but the sale required that they first clear all the ordnance off it. That was no simple task, and the military was not interested in the job. Instead, the family found Val Forgett Jr, a demolitions expert who happened to be looking for seed money to start a business making reproduction black powder revolvers. His offer to do the cleanup work was accepted, and he spent a summer doing the job and put the proceeds into the first Navy Arms reproduction 1851 Colt Navy revolvers.
This video includes the talk given by Forgett to the Armor and Arms Club of New York in the 1990s explaining the process of clearing out the ordnance from the island…
This amounted to low-paid EOD work in the time picric acid was common. I’m glad it worked out well for Val, and this was the epitome of an adventure in surplus.
If I was around when Bannerman’s business was at its prime, I would have gone to New York and blown my life’s savings on stuff. I have seen pages from the catalogs and they are like the listing of the greatest candy store in the world for arms enthusiasts.
One shudders to contemplate what the whole thing would have looked like had it gone down at any point past the 1960s…
The bureaucracy that grew up in the period after that would have almost mandated something on the scale of an EPA Superfund site, with millions of dollars spent and God alone knows how many people involved in just the paperwork. They’d probably still be doing the work today…