French WWI Signal Rocket, Verdun Battlefield 1922, G.B.Jarrett Collection
This item is listed for historical interest only. It was listed on our site previously but has been sold and is no longer available for purchase.
Sold for: $275.00

Original era manufacture. A fairly intact, WWI French signal rocket, recovered on the Verdun battlefield in 1922, by George Burling Jarrett, 1901-1974, who as a young man toured the battlefields of France in that year.The overall length is 35 inches, with the cardboard tube measuring 12.5 inches. Amazingly the original label is intact, being quite probable that the rocket was found in an abandoned bunker, kept out of the effects of weather.An old handwritten sales string-tag is attached to the wooden rod, on one side it reads;" French WWI Signal Rocket, Verdun Battlefield 1922, Gift of G.B. Jarrett, and the other side, from "Jarrett Museum of World War History". George Burling Jarrett was a collector's collector, starting at a very young age with items inherited from family members who served in the Civil War. This modest beginning grew to be a life-long avocation, expanding to a museum dedicated to World War One at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, and later to his Inlaw's farm in Moorestown New Jersey. He accumulated thousands of artifacts during his collecting career to include tanks, heavy artillery, aircraft, weapons and much, much more. An article published in the magazine Flying Aces, July 1937, tells of Jarrett's trip to France in 1922; "The summer of 1922 found me wandering with a watchful eye through the battlefields of the Western front. In order to get better acquainted with the shell-hammered sectors and to come closer to their spirit, I rented a bicycle, and pedaled about the country. My entire equipment - mainly a toilet kit and a blanket - was carried on the "wheel". I often spent nights with peasants of the section in crude shacks they had built from leftover military supplies - sheet iron, ammunition boxes, and the like. And curios of every kind were mine for the taking, as they lay in indescribable confusion on the deserted battlefields. In the early fall of the year of my battlefield tour, I returned to America and to school."