A Boerne boy and 72,500 wooden blocks

Adolph Toepperwein, called Ad, was born in Boerne in October 1869. The sources differ by a day on the date, so October will have to do. His parents were German immigrants: Emil Albrecht Ferdinand Toepperwein and Johanna, born Bergmann. His father was a well-known gunsmith.

Boerne was a young town then. It had been laid out in 1852 and made the county seat in 1862. Its courthouse went up the year after Ad was born, and the railroad did not arrive until 1887. A shooting club, the Boerne Schuetzen Verein, had been formed in 1864.

The family did not stay long. Soon after Ad’s birth they moved to Leon Springs, in Bexar County. His father died when the boy was thirteen.

Fifty years with one company

In 1901 Toepperwein began working for the Winchester Repeating Arms Company as an exhibition shooter. The association lasted fifty years.

In 1903 he married Elizabeth Servaty. Under the name “Plinky” she became a celebrated exhibition shot in her own right.

That gives the Hill Country two ties to Winchester that the record will support. The other is Engelbert Krauskopf, a Fredericksburg gunsmith of an earlier generation, who was the company’s agent for Gillespie County. Krauskopf ordered his barrels from the East and made the triggers, hammers, sights and stocks himself.

Ten days in December

In San Antonio, from December 13 to December 22, 1907, Toepperwein shot at wooden blocks. He used three Winchester Model 1903 .22 autoloading rifles. He fired at 72,500 blocks. He missed nine. It took 68½ hours of shooting.

Those figures are the Handbook of Texas’s. The arithmetic that follows is ours. Spread evenly over the hours he shot, that is more than a thousand blocks an hour, or one about every three and a half seconds, across all 68½ of them. Nine misses in 72,500 is roughly one in eight thousand.

What the number means

It is tempting to call that a gift and leave it there. A bench reading is different. Nobody hits 72,491 of anything without doing the same thing, the same way, every single time. The same mount. The same look down the sights. The same press of the trigger. The seventy-thousandth shot has to be made exactly like the seventh.

Accuracy at a workbench is the same kind of thing. There is no trick in it. A scope stays zeroed because each screw was cleaned and tightened to the same figure as the one beside it. A bedding job holds because every step was done in order and none was skipped. The skill is mostly the willingness to do an ordinary thing carefully one more time.

Patience of that kind is not a temperament. It is practiced, like anything else.

The rest of the record

Toepperwein retired in 1951. He died in San Antonio on March 4, 1962.

There is more told about the Toepperweins than we have been able to check, including where in the Hill Country his father’s bench stood. A line about boys and rifles is often printed over Ad’s name without a source. We have left out what we could not trace. If you know more, and can point to where it is written down, the shop would like to hear from you.