Regarding “The Garand Finale” (August 2024, p. 28), I had some information to add that was discovered during a 1994 research trip to the Sales and Donations section of Rock Island Arsenal. Even prior to that trip, I noticed that readers would periodically ask American Rifleman what the highest Garand serial number was, and the early answers quoted the accepted wisdom from government records that the last M1 was Serial No. 6084405 assembled at a May 17, 1957, ceremony in Springfield attended by John Garand and on display at the Springfield Armory Museum. Eventually, one reader wrote something like, “You said the highest Garand serial was 6084405, but I have one numbered 6091234.”
That resulted in a follow-up explaining that the rifles were not assembled in serial number order and that it is possible to find higher numbers made earlier. It added that “the highest M1 serial number recorded at Springfield Armory is 6099905,” and collectors accepted this as definitive—until a perfect National Match M1 numbered 6100256 turned up at the Ohio Gun Show! This engendered my trip to Moline to try to run it down. What I found was daunting: The records were small slips of paper about the size of an index card, filed in cabinets like a library catalog—drawers and drawers of them—maybe half a million. There was a slip for every rifle sold or donated to civilians, museums, VFWs, American Legions, foreign governments, etc.!
Well, the highest M1 number should be easy: go to the last slip in the last drawer and look, except that this turned out to be a 23,000,000 number! Besides that whopper, there was a 12,000,000 and several in the 7,000,000 and 8,000,000 ranges. I asked Joe Casadei, the head of the section, how that could be. He said that the data came from many different reporting agencies and that he had no choice but to accept what they submitted. In addition, Sales and Donations employed a lot of summer help to transcribe the data to the cards, mostly teenage girls from the local high school. We know mistakes are easy to make, especially if you are not familiar with the subject. The cards had boxes for “Model” and “Type”—but if you don’t know the subject, an M1 is an M1, so there were innumerable M1 carbine serials mixed in. Ditto for “Rifle Cal. .30”—lots of 1903 Springfield numbers. I recorded the addresses of several American Legion Posts that had received 6,900,000 Garands and wrote to them for clarification. One was an M1 carbine, the other two were actually 5,900,000 numbers. The 23,000,000 record was clearly a 2,000,000 rifle with a duplicated digit.
However, I found five National Match rifles with serials above 6100000. The highest was 6100499 sold by the DCM to a shooter in Connecticut for $98 in 1958. The complete account was featured in the Winter 1994 GCA Journal (thegca.org/high-serial-numbers/). Years later, Roger Miner showed up at a GCA convention wearing a shirt with “I Own 6100499” on the back in large letters. His daughter wrote an article about him and his rifle that appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of the magazine (thegca.org/winning-the-dcm-lottery/). The question of the highest M1 serial number was solved.
—Bob Seijas, Chairman Emeritus, The Garand Collectors Ass’n
