POTD: The Winchester Model 20 Junior Trap Outfit – Trap in a Suitcase

Welcome to today’s Photo of the Day! Here we have Winchester trying to invent the youth shooting market and packing it in a suitcase. Winchester came out of World War One with an enormous factory and not enough to build in it. The answer was to sell everything.

By 1919 there were Winchester branded pocket knives, flashlights, roller skates, fishing reels and home appliances moving through hardware stores, and by 1922 Winchester product sat in roughly a quarter of the hardware stores in America. That whole push helped drive the company into receivership by 1931, but it threw off some great oddities on the way down.

The Model 20 is one of them. A little 410 single barrel break action, made 1920 to 1924, about 24,000 built. On its own it is a plain gun. Packaged as the Junior Trapshooting Outfit it turns into something else: the shotgun, a Midget Hand Trap, boxes of undersized clay targets, shells, cleaning gear and score sheets, all in a case roughly thirty inches long that went forty pounds loaded.

Winchester sold it as a whole sport you could throw in the back of the car. The catalog copy promised almost no recoil, so it could be used safely by women and children, which was reasonably forward thinking for 1920.

Long story short, this is backyard clays a hundred years before anybody called it that, and I would hand one to a kid today without thinking twice.

Most of our POTDs utilize images from our friends at Rock Island Auction Company, the premier firearms auction in the United States. Take some time to browse their current auctions – who knows, maybe you’ll find a piece of history to take home!

“Desirable Winchester Model 20 Shotgun Junior Trapshooting Outfit.” Rock Island Auction, www.rockislandauction.com/detail/4097/448/desirable-winchester-model-20-shotgun-junior-trapshooting-outfit. Accessed 14 Sept. 2026.

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