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Looking back now, Rich Cole knows opening his gunsmithing shop on Bog Hollow Road, just off Harpswell Neck’s main drag, in 1985 was a big mistake. It was far too isolated to attract the kind of clientele Cole was looking for: bird hunters and competitive clay target shooters interested in custom, high-end, Italian shotguns as beautiful as they are accurate.
“I couldn’t have picked a worse place,” he said. “When people drive down here they say, ‘What the hell were you thinking, putting this kind of a business on a dead-end road?'”
But Cole, now 69, made it work. Year by year, he honed a national reputation for excellent guns and personal customer service. Now, his out-of-the-way location doesn’t matter at all. Serious shotgunners ship their firearms to Cole Fine Guns & Gunsmithing for repair from all over the country.
Customers also fly to Maine and make their way to the shop to pick out components and get fitted for one-of-a-kind shotguns Cole and his team make just for them. These custom pieces can easily cost $15,000 to $25,000.
In recent years, Cole has expanded his business, opening shops in Naples, Florida, and San Antonio, Texas. Between the three shops, Cole employs about two dozen people, including several gunsmiths and all three of his children.
Jim Bellegarde has worked at Cole’s Harpswell shop for 25 years. In 2001, Bellegarde was the seafood manager at Brunswick’s Hannaford Supermarket. He’d talk to Cole across the counter and one day said he wished he could be a gunsmith. Cole invited him down to the shop on his lunch break and then offered to train him.
“I went back to work after my lunch hour and gave my two-week notice,” Bellegarde said. “I’ve been here ever since. It’s something I wanted to do my whole life and to get to do it at this level of quality — I love it. I love coming to work every day.”
Cole grew up in the Maryland suburbs just outside Washington, D.C. He and his father, who worked on spy satellite projects at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, tinkered with guns and spent weekends at amateur shooting competitions.
“I knew that I wanted to be a gunsmith from the time I was 12 years old,” Cole said.
He first visited Harpswell in 1978. His older sister, longtime veterinarian Barbara D’Onofrio, already lived there. The next year, Cole got an entry-level job with the famed Italian gunmaker Beretta. He spent the next six years working at a Beretta location in Accokeek, Maryland, while also apprenticing in Gardone Val Trompia, Italy, where he received extensive gunsmith training.
In 1985, Cole set out on his own, coming back to Harpswell and setting up shop. At first, it was slow going. He made ends meet as a subcontractor doing repair work for other gunsmiths, and by working odd jobs.
“I dug clams, I went lobstering, I worked on a shrimp boat, I worked as a mason’s tender, I worked in a machine shop,” Cole said. “I did all the jobs that a young guy has got to do in order to be able to finally afford to work on his passion.”
Cole eventually became an authorized Beretta service center, doing certified repair work and warranty repairs on the expensive brand’s shotguns. His shop now deals with similar brands, as well, including Rizzini and Perazzi. From the start, Cole has specialized in double-barrel, over-under shotguns with internal hammers — mostly for two reasons.
First, they’re gorgeous working pieces of fine art with gleaming, filigreed metal parts and elegant walnut grips and stocks.
“To me, there’s just an incredible elegance,” Cole said. “The engineering is old engineering. The best designs, of the finest guns today, still have 100-year-old engineering. They have refined things a little bit with computer-aided design, but they haven’t come up with a better mousetrap.”
Second, even back in the 1980s, Cole wanted to stay outside of brewing gun debates and regulations. His style of shotgun is expensive and mostly small-caliber. They carry just two rounds and stand apart from more controversial handguns and military-style rifles.
“I’m a Second Amendment guy,” Cole said, “but I think it’s too easy to buy an AR-15 or a high-capacity handgun. I’m not for banning things, but I do think that there could be controls that could be put into place that would prevent how easy it is to get them, at a broad level.”
Fine shotguns, he reckons, are rarely used by criminals.
“When have you ever heard of someone doing a drive-by shooting with an expensive shotgun?” Cole said. “You don’t.”
At almost 70 years old, Cole still works in his shops, often hand-carving grips and stocks from figured Turkish walnut slabs, leaving his gunsmiths, with younger eyes, to work with the fine internal firing mechanisms. Though he has no immediate plans to retire, Cole said he can see it on the horizon. He plans to hand the business off to his children one day.
Until then, Cole will continue to bounce between his three business locations and another home in Rangeley, all the while thinking of Harpswell as home.
“To be able to live, and make a living, here — it’s a blessing,” he said.
