Sell your guns in Escanaba.

Buying in Escanaba and Delta County

Delta County holds 31 licensed dealers, more than most of the Upper Peninsula, and eleven of them are manufacturers.

Thirty-one licensed dealers across eight towns makes Delta one of the denser markets in the U.P., and eleven manufacturing licenses in a county this size is notable. Collections here run to working guns kept properly through hard winters, with more gunsmith and custom work than the population would suggest. Like the rest of the peninsula this is a planned trip instead of a same-week one.

Roughly a quarter of Delta County's 31 licenses — 11 of them — are manufacturing licenses. Collections here tend to include at least one gun that somebody worked on rather than bought, and those are the ones worth slowing down over.

No pawnbroker holds a license anywhere in the county. Guns here move dealer to dealer or hand to hand, and estates are correspondingly more complete than in places with a pawn counter on every other corner.

What collections look like around here

Northern Michigan collections are built around deer camp and the lakes. Grand Traverse County holds 31 licensed dealers serving a much wider area than its size suggests, because people drive for an hour up here without thinking about it. Expect rifles and shotguns that have been used hard and honestly, and the occasional very good gun bought in a better year.

Estates in Delta County

Cottages and camps are where northern estates get interesting. Firearms left at a family place are often forgotten entirely for a decade or more, and they’re also the ones most likely to have suffered from damp storage. Both facts are worth knowing before anyone agrees a price.

We also cover Gladstone, Bark River, Rapid River, Cornell, Garden and Nahma — and the rest of Michigan besides. If you have something worth looking at, distance is our problem, not yours.

How far up do you actually go?

As far as it’s worth going. Delta and Marquette counties we treat as one trip when we plan it, so a collection in Escanaba and another in Gladstone are better dealt with together. Tell us what is there and we’ll be straight about whether we’re coming.

Where to go next

Settling an estate ·Selling your own collection ·Closing a shop ·What sets the price ·You inherited firearms

One thing worth knowing before anyone looks at it, wherever you are: don’t clean it. A polished or re-blued gun can be worth a fraction of an untouched one, and it can’t be undone.