THE WINCHESTER 59, by Dave McCracken
About the time the DeSoto went out of production, Winchester came out with a Model 50 autoloader. A blowback or recoil operated action of innovative design, the 50 made little headway against the tide of A-5s and Remington 11s, 11-48s and 1100s, and disappeared from the scene to be replaced by the legendary X-1. The design included a floating chamber conceived by Marsh Williams, the moonshiner and designer of the M1 carbine.
Before all that, the folks at Winchester brought out a superb upland shotgun based on the 50 and called it the Model 59. It had a few brand new ideas and features. That proved to be both blessing and curse.
First and foremost, it had fiber wrapped around a steel barrel liner and epoxied to produce a strong, straight barrel of much less weight than the usual barrels. One sees this method on rifle barrels now,but still not on shotguns. A shame...
Second, some of those barrels were threaded for tubes that contained various degrees of choke. While the first choke tube patent in the US was granted before the Civil War, no widely available shotgun was offered with tubes until the 59. Now, few new shotguns are offered without them.
The result of the barrel and the lightweight design was a very light shotgun, on the order of 6 lbs and sometimes less. Many were snapped up by grouse hunters in New England, whose hunting grounds mostly occur on a slant. Grouse hunters need good legs and light shotguns, the 59 solved half of it.
Among others, Frank Woolner got his hands on one and fell in love. After some modification, his weighed even less than usual and killed grouse very well. Since Frank was a widely read writer, the 59 got some good ink and attention. We can still run across some bright eyed oldsters with 59s they used since JFK was president and happy they are with them.
