Last weekend I visited my mom who is currently cataloguing my late stepfathers firearms collection. I became intrigued by one particular piece and chose it to research. Although my stepdad was meticulous in researching his collection, he had been very ill the last couple of years and we do not know where his more recent write-ups were stored. The one mention of this gun was one line from a 2014 inventory, 1860 Spencer Repeater, 50%. I wish I had had the time to do more online research before having to leave. I have become a bit obsessively curious about Spencers as I have researched them this past week, and I am sorry to say I do not even know if the gun in question was a rifle or a carbine.
That said, there is one thing that we have had no luck at all figuring out. On the top of the shoulder stock (which I now know think? is called the comb), there is a weird not-quite-symmetrical metal plate attached with two nails? pins? I dont really know. My mom sent me the attached photo which is so out of focus that the plate looks smooth, but it actually has engraving.
Line 1 is unreadable from wear
Line 2 is unreadable because one of the pins goes through it
Line 3 says New York
Underneath these lines of very small print is a larger 4
I know it is pretty impertinent of me to ask for help on the basis of so little hard evidence, but might anyone have any idea at all what this plate could mean?
Edit - for some reason all my apostrophes and quotation marks got weird so I updated to get rid of them.