Our Story
Built so families are not taken advantage of.
Minturn & Co. exists because too often, the people settling a firearm collection — usually family and executors — get squeezed by buyers and dealers who know far more than the family does. I have watched it happen to my own parents and to the parents of friends. This practice is the alternative: someone experienced, discreet, and firmly on the family's side.
Why I Started
Families deserve someone on their side.
A firearm collection is specialized territory, and most families simply do not know what they have — not the values, not the law, not the right process. That not-knowing is exactly what the sharks count on: a buyer who can quietly undervalue a collection, pressure a quick sale, or steer everything toward their own counter.
I started Minturn & Co. to be the opposite of that: a steady, informed hand whose job is to return fair market value to the estate and handle everything lawfully and carefully. Whether I'm sitting down with a family directly or working alongside their probate attorney or estate executor, I work for them.
It began with an old family friend. He was in the last stages of cancer when he called and said, “I have two weeks — can you come?” He was on Whidbey Island, 585 miles away. It took five trips to gather and square away the collection, and after he passed, a sixth — to collect the final pieces and stand with his family at his funeral. Six trips, a month of travel, roughly 7,500 miles of driving: back and forth to Boise, and the runs in between to dispose of what could not be kept. What began as a favor to a friend became this practice — and the work that set me on my way.
Experience You Can Trust
Experienced, and in it for the long term.
What the family and executor most want to know is that the person handling the collection has been around, knows what they are doing, and can be trusted. My background in firearms and shooting sports goes back generations, and for the better part of a decade the practice has grown entirely by word of mouth — one family referring the next.
Firearms vary widely in how they operate, and clearing them safely takes real familiarity — not the kind that comes from watching them on screen. I have been around them for decades, and I still come across details or features I haven't seen before — and find myself digging through reference texts for answers.
Over the years I have been as at ease with substantial collections and the people around them as with smaller estates and the families behind them. The work runs the same range — high-end one day, hard physical work the next. My first year running Minturn & Co., across the estates I handled, I moved four tons of reloading equipment, components, and firearms by myself. Large estate or small, I am there for every job from load up to lock up to pay out. Whoever you are, you are dealing with someone who is not out of his depth, who won't look down on you or your estate, and who does the heavy lifting himself.
I would rather turn down work than compromise how it is done. Every engagement is insured, ATF-compliant, and handled with the discretion a difficult moment demands.
The Names
A family tied to firearms for generations.
My family is English and American. The Quickes are a centuries-old English family from Devon and Somerset, with roots that go back to the 1200s. The Minturns reach back before the United States itself, through John Bowne, who came to the Massachusetts colony in 1649, to Robert Bowne Minturn, whose New York family were shipping merchants in the 1800s.
The crest beside this page comes from an 1865 silver bowl, engraved with the Quicke family's heraldic antelope and gifted by Robert Bowne Minturn to his grandson, John Minturn Quicke, whose initials — JMQ — I share. I recreated the crest by hand from that engraving to become the mark for Minturn & Co.
On the English side, the family has shot for at least four generations — my father and grandfather, and both my great-grandfathers before them — serious shots with bespoke guns. One of those guns was a shotgun my father shot for years and took with him everywhere. When the family needed to, it was sold to pay my school fees. I would have liked it passed down to me, but it went to someone else, and that is how it goes.
That shotgun passed down through the generations. It became a hidden asset the family turned to in a time of need. That is how I have come to see firearm collections: an asset class, much like a piece of fine art or a collectible car. They can sit tucked away for decades before a family needs to draw on them. My part is a small one in these stories. I help families realize that value, and find the firearms new homes with people who will use and care for them for years to come.
What We Stand For
Restraint, judgment, and care.
Families deserve clarity when they are already dealing with difficult decisions. So the work is steady and direct — no sales language, no unnecessary ornament. Hard work and familiarity with the field are not enough on their own; sooner or later the job calls for judgment — when to move, when to wait, when to put my foot down on a safety issue. That judgment, alongside clear answers and fair process, is what respect for the families and the firearms actually looks like.
A firearm is a tool, but many are more than that. That tool sometimes reflects hundreds of hours of craft and a lifetime of use, and holds the stories of the people who carried it. When one leaves an estate, I want to know it has gone to a good home, to someone who will use it and care for it. That is care for the estate itself, not only the family behind it.
A steady hand for your estate.
If you are facing a firearm collection and want someone experienced, discreet, and on your side, get in touch in confidence.