Fort Ticonderoga gets firearm windfall

TICONDEROGA, N.Y. - An upstate New York historic site has been given a collection of more than 100 antique firearms and other weapons donated by a Michigan couple.

Officials at Fort Ticonderoga say the collection of 132 swords, pistols, muskets and other guns was donated this past summer by Grafton and Barbara Cook of Niles, Mich.

Grafton Cook made the gift before he died Aug. 7. He was 79 and had started the collection at the age of 6, when a friend gave him a bayonet for a French rifle.

It included military weaponry from the 17th through the early 19th centuries.

There are dozens of British, French and American swords dating back to the mid-1600s and an early 17th-century matchlock musket similar to the type carried by Samuel de Champlain when he explored the region in 1609.