1986: James Kenny Jarrett, Super Accurate Rifle GuruJames Kenny Jarrett’s farm machinery know-how helped him build rifles with accuracy neverseen before.

Life at Home

• James Kenny Jarrett was obsessed with achieving the kind of pinpoint rifle accuracy most hunters

never considered possible.

• Kenny’s precision standard revolved around the ability to fire three bullets through the same hole at

a distance of 300 yards.

• Or, at the very least, to consistently hit a penny from a distance of three football fields.

• He already personally held six world records for competitive shooting and his rifles had established

nine more.

• But since his first love was hunting, Kenny’s real passion was for the development of super accurate

hunting rifles and hand-loaded cartridges that delivered in the field.

• His inventive dedication to accuracy had already earned the bearded, tobacco-chewing “good ol’

boy” from rural South Carolina a local following of Southern hunters eager to take down a big buck

at 400 yards.

• Now it was time to expand his market to include a national audience.

• Kenny grew up a soybean farmer on his uncle’s 10,000-acre Cowden Plantation, situated on a

secondary road near Jackson, South

Carolina.

• By the age of 12, he had a farm boy’s

familiarity with machinery, matched

by a natural ability to create and

fabricate with his hands what his

brain envisioned.

• His days were consumed by farming

problems and deer hunting pleasures

on the expansive property of Cowden

Plantation, bordered by the

Savannah River to the west and the

government-controlled Savannah

River Site to the south, where

plutonium had been manufactured

since the 1950s.

• But Kenny eventually grew frustrated

that off-the-rack hunting rifles rarely

delivered the accuracy he needed to

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James Kennedy Jarrett’s handcrafted precision rifles were a hunter’s dream.

bag the shy bucks who warily stayed on the

fringes of the soybean fields 400 yards

away—and out of range.

• He decided to do something about it: he

bought a metal lathe and began building

precision big-game rifles as a hobby.

• Like most one-man operations, Kenny

started out making rifles using

customer-supplied actions which he retuned

to fit with an outsourced barrel and stock.

• His results were inconsistent.

• The performance of the rifle, after all,

depended on the quality of the components

as much as the skill with which they’ve been

put together.

• It was a time of learning, listening, and absorbing the accuracy lessons of the hyper-competitive

benchrest shooting crowd.

• He came to hate the phrase “good enough,” as in “good enough for hunting,” as he formed a vision

of inventing a precision rifle that exceeded expectations for accuracy.

• Then, in 1979, after farming most of his life, Kenny turned to gunsmithing full-time.

• For the next seven years, Kenny stayed busy building hunting rifles to his exacting

specifications—often exceeding the expectations of his customers, who bragged about their Jarrett

rifle at every hunt camp in the South.

• His own field exploits added to the mystique after Kenny fired one memorable shot that took down a

gemsbok in Africa at 557 yards.

• At the same time, he continued pursuing another

passion—collecting the artifacts left on the river

banks of the Savannah River or in the fields by

multiple generations of Native Americans.

• The flowing waters of the Savannah River had

attracted some of the earliest inhabitants to the

region, most of whom left some evidence of their

lives: from scrapers, to projectile points, to nutting

rocks.

• Nearly every year’s plowing exposed new “points”

and even delicately carved gorgets, which were

worn around the neck.

• Each was appropriately preserved and mounted in

glass cases that dominated an entire room in

Kenny’s home.

• Like most things in his life, there was an exacting

artistry to the display.

• In addition, to accommodate the needs of a

growing family, Kenny built a swimming pool and

fishing ponds, and purchased trampoline sets for

the children.

• A fourth-generation soybean farmer, Kenny was

determined to keep his kids on the farm.

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This Is Who We Were In The 1980s

Jarrett was not satisfied with a “good enough for hunting” rifle.

A Jarrett rifle, although more expensive than most, was wellworth the money.

Life at Work

• Kenny Jarrett realized early on there was a niche in the gun market

for an accurate game rifle that was built the right way—even when

experts predicted that hunters would not pay topdrawer prices for a

hunting rifle.

• Traditionally, the highest-priced rifles sported highly carved walnut

stocks that added artistry and weight to the rifle, but not

dependability.

• Kenny abstained from using walnut stocks—in fact, any wood stocks

at all—convinced that wood movement was a handicap to accuracy.

• To attract the elite hunter willing to spend triple the ordinary price

for a one-of-a-kind hunting experience, he needed to be the best.

• To be the entrepreneur he envisioned, he also had to capture the

title of inventor and find a mentor.

• The most influential accuracy expert was Texas gunmaker and

benchrest shooter Harold Broughton, who took the time to set

Kenny on the right path to making accurate rifles.

• But it was hundreds of hours in the shop and more than a few

sleepless nights that gave Kenny the insights he needed to be a

pioneer.

• His first year building rifles he grossed $17,000—enough to

encourage expansion.

• By 1985, the sale of Jarrett rifles topped $300,000 and 13 people

were working in his 2,200-square-foot shop built of cypress wood

milled by Kenny using trees cut from his property.

• The basic price for a Jarrett rifle

was about $2,800; extensive

options could hike the price up to as much as $4,500.

• “If your rifle ain’t accurate, you might as well have a pocket full

of firecrackers, ‘cause all you’ll have is a noisemaker,” he told

the nation’s top sports writers when they journeyed to remote

Jackson, 40 minutes from Aiken, South Carolina.

• There he entertained the nation’s most widely read hunting

experts with long-range shooting demonstrations, fried catfish

dinners and lots of homespun wisdom.

• “There’s no magic in what I do. It ties correctly education, trial

and error, and beating my head against the wall until it’s right.”

• He talked his Bubba talk, spat his chewing tobacco, and dazzled

the writers with his long-range weapons, soon dubbed the

“beanfield rifle”—an ultra-deadly rifle/cartridge combination

for taking whitetail deer at long distances, typically 300 to 400

yards.

• In appreciation, the nation’s most respected hunting and fishing

magazines featured Kenny’s country-wise quotes, constant

suspenders and expensive rifles on their pages.

• He understood that the number of hunters willing to risk a

marital fight to own a Jarrett was small and scattered, and he

had to find that market by becoming a national name.

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Crafting a Jarrett rifle took many hoursand each customer waited a long time toown one.

The specifications for a Jarrett rifle were soexact that many supplier parts had to berefitted.

• So he traveled to gun shows and national meetings where

he talked, promoted and demonstrated.

• Eventually, the cult of accuracy and the personality of

Kenny Jarrett were intertwined.

• Sales increased, his delivery time on a custom gun

stretched to one year, and competitors scrambled out of

the woodwork—each claiming to be an accuracy guru.

• “I never wanted to be rich; I just wanted to be the best,”

he explained.

• So he continued to listen, innovate and promote.

• But building a Jarrett rifle was a very labor-intensive

process, limiting the number of guns that could be made

to his exacting standards.

• He was encouraged to borrow more money and double

the size of his shop, so the nine- to 12-month backlog of

orders could be reduced.

• He was encouraged to move to a city where he’d have

more exposure to customers, and advised to make less

expensive rifles, even if it meant compromising quality.

• He listened, but took his own path.

• “When you get one of my rifles, the other rifles will gather dust ‘cause you won’t want to shoot them

anymore.”

• “It isn’t that you need a half minute rifle to shoot deer; you pay the extra because accurate is what a

rifle should be, and you can’t abide a rifle that doesn’t measure up.”

• Of the one million-plus rifles sold each year, less than 5,000 were custom-built.

• “We are not everything to everybody and we don’t try to be” Kenny said.

• But challenges remained.

• He found that one-third of the barrels he bought from the best supplier in the business would not

shoot to his standard of sub one minute.

• These barrels were well built and achieved the benchrest standard of the day with a bore diameter

with a consistency of three 10-thousands of an inch from the breech to the muzzle.

• Kenny decided that to get better performance, a barrel must have a deviation of no more than

one-tenth of a thousandth.

• No one manufactured a barrel with that standard, so

Kenny decided he would do it himself.

• Most Jarrett rifles began with a Remington 700 action,

but so much time was devoted to refitting; he was

moving toward custom actions for all his rifles—a

project that could take years.

• For testing his new rifles, Kenny established a

state-of-the-art 100-, 200- and even 600-yard firing

range; that way he didn’t have to guess what his guns

and cartridges would do at these distances—he knew.

• And he tested every rifle before it was sent to a customer.

• But most of all, the accuracy guru who loved to

promote his inventions listened.

• He asked questions, made adjustments and studied the

trends.

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Jarrett’s words of wisdom were almost as famous ashis standards for accuracy.

Jarrett tested each rifle before it was sent to the customer.

• “You can’t get educated in a day,” Kenny said, “I learn something everyday.”

Life in the Community: Cowden Plantation, Jackson, South Carolina

• Cowden Plantation in tiny Jackson, South Carolina snuggled up to the broad shoulders of the

Savannah River for more than a mile.

• For 4,000 years, hunters had roamed the fields, oxbows and cypress swamps.

• Ancient artifacts, left behind thousands of years ago, tell the tale of tribes of hunters who relied on

this land for their survival.

• Antebellum days brought King Cotton to Cowden under the ownership of James Henry Hammond,

a South Carolina governor whose home, Redcliffe, still proudly stands.

• The sprawling Savannah River Site near Cowden Plantation was constructed during the early 1950s

to produce the basic materials used in the fabrication of nuclear weapons, primarily tritium and

plutonium-239.

• These materials were used in support of our nation’s defense programs, a result of the Cold War.

• The communist Soviet Union had recently tested a nuclear weapon of its own, and America’s brief

tenure as the lone holder of nuclear weapons in the world was at an end.

• In the immediate aftermath of the American bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, scientists

worldwide were horrified by the power that had been unleashed.

• But the emergence of the Soviet Union as a nuclear power happened in the midst of scientific and

political debate; retaliation, it was felt, was the only defense, and a remote corner of South Carolina

was a necessary tool in that battle.

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