For untold years in the mouse-infested, secret crawlspace of an attic in Newark, Delaware, a man named Michael Kintner Corbett kept priceless American history locked away from the world.
That is, until the FBI came calling.
On May 24, 2017, FBI agents led by art crimes Special Agent Jake Archer executed a search warrant and found the hidden upper room of Corbett’s Newark residence and a safe tucked in the basement.
In the process, the agents broke open a 50-year mystery spanning six states, 16 museums and dozens of historic firearms whose provenance spans the entire history of America – a rash of museum burglaries Archer calls “one of the largest of its kind that we’re aware of.”
In the end, 73-year-old Corbett would serve just a single day in prison.
But after a long and cheerful repatriation ceremony at Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution on Monday, March 13 – broken often by laughter and the sound of curators’ ill-contained relief – those historic firearms are finally going home and back into the public trust.
To the Daniel Boone Homestead. To the Museum of Connecticut History. To the Blair and Delaware County museums in Pennsylvania, and the Beauvoir Museum in Biloxi, Mississippi.
Pennsylvania’s Hershey Story museum – yes, the one with all the chocolate – is bringing home a volcanic pistol from a disastrous Civil War skirmish that saw Oregon Sen. Everett Baker fall in battle, the only sitting U.S. senator ever to do so.
At least one of the recovered guns, a Colt Whitneyville Walker stolen from Connecticut, might be worth as much as a million dollars.
But whatever their monetary value, these historic items are “priceless and irreplaceable” to the museums and the communities they belong to, said President Thomas Stockton of the Stone House Museum in Belchertown, Massachusetts, who called an 18th-century powder horn a "thrilling" recovery.
“These objects, as with everything being returned today, connect us with the past – with real people, places, events and ideals – in ways that are as important and significant to us now as they were when they were held and used by their owners many years ago,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney K.T. Newton, who headed the prosecution.