This enterprise in Furnace Hill made some of the finest Bowie knives in the decade or so preceding the American Civil War.  Several are depicted in Flayderman (2004)¹.  Adams et al (1990)² has a fine Gold Rush example with a gold-washed acid etched slogan: ‘Heigh for California’.  The business can be traced to John Wragg, who was born in Sheffield on 10 April 1805, the son of Samuel, a cutler, and his wife, Sarah.  His brother was Samuel C. Wragg.  Samuel Wragg Sen. may have been the pen and pocket knife cutler, who was listed at various addresses – Cross Smithfield, Trinity Street, Oborne Street, and Furnace Hill – between 1817 and the early 1830s.  John was originally a scale cutter, but by the mid-1840s was active as a manufacturer of spring knife cutlery, dirks, daggers, and hunting knives at 38 Furnace Hill.  In the directory (1849), I. Wragg & Sons advertised, using the mark ‘XLNT’ (later seen on cutlery by Moulson Bros).  In the Census (1851), John Wragg described himself as a ‘master cutler’, aged 46.  He was living at 38 Furnace Hill with his wife, Ann, and his son, Samuel, a 24 year-old scale maker.  

John’s father, Samuel, was a heavy drinker.  After his wife’s death, he spent several days consoling himself with the bottle, before collapsing dead at home on 26 August 1846, aged 62.  The inquest, which appropriately was held in a pub, recorded a verdict of ‘apoplexy, accelerated by drinking’.   John Wragg died on 1 August 1852, aged 47, on a Sunday train excursion to Worksop.  The inquest verdict was death due to ‘apoplexy’, the coroner noting that he had held the previous inquest on John’s father (Sheffield Independent, 7 August 1852).

^1. Flayderman, Norm, The Bowie Knife: Unsheathing an American Legend (Woonsocket, RI, 2004)
^2. Adams, W, Voyles, J  B, and Moss, T, The Antique Bowie Knife Book (Conyers, Georgia, 1990)