An old shot load in a fowler!

[JTR]

 I’ve known for some time that one of the New England fowlers I have has had something down the barrel. I didn’t know what, but a guy has expressed an interest in the old thing, so I thought I should find out for sure just what’s down there. This is an 1820/30 fowler, originally full stocked curly maple and flint, but now a broken fore stocked percussion now.
Poking down there with a long drill brought out something sort of soft, not cloth, but maybe paper. But poking like this wasn’t going to bring out whatever it might be, so I gave the breech plug a shot of WD-40, let it soak a bit. The breech on this fowler is hefty, measuring 1.110” across the flats, so I carefully but firmly clamped the barrel in my vice. This barrel already has plenty of vice marks on it, but I was careful not to add to them. While the WD-40 continued to soak in I searched for the 18” Crescent wrench I knew I had, well, someplace. This length of wrench seems to work well for this sort of thing. It’s not so long that you can easily twist off the back end of the breech plug, but long enough to get a stubborn one to start to turn, and then work it out, if it’s going to come out. As most of these plugs do, this one has tapered threads much like a modern pipe thread.
The first picture is the plug. It’s .670” in diameter at the base and .625” diameter at the end, and .575” long. It’s threaded with about 8 or 9 threads per inch. It looks like it might have leaked a little pressure by the first 3 threads, but that the last two seemed to have held without leaking.



 Once the plug was out I shined my flashlight into the breech, and saw what looked like old powder. I should have got a picture of it, but didn’t. So, I stared picking at the powder and got a little out, then a little more, and then wondered if it’d be possible to punch the whole load out through the muzzle to sort of keep the load intact. Maybe it’s just me, but I like to explore old things like this, to see how it was loaded and with what. So I found about a 12 inch long piece of ½” diameter ramrod doweling, put a wadded up piece of patching material up against the powder, then the end of the stick, then tapped the other end with a smallish hammer. Nothing moved at first, but after a couple small whacks the load started creeping out towards the muzzle!

So this is what we have. The 2nd picture is the over shot wad just out of the barrel, next is the shot load then the over powder wad, and finally the powder charge.
By the way, the bore measures .610”.
For some spec’s on this load, the powder is mostly very fine, almost dust now. The intact pieces look about like 3F size. As is, the powder charge weighs 42 grains on my scale.
The shot charge has 67 balls, about .110” diameter, and altogether weigh 130 grains on the same scale.







 Interestingly, when I pushed the first wad out of the barrel, I noticed a small printed letter on it, and I thought sure, it’s newspaper! So once I had the entire load pushed out, and being curious, I couldn’t just let it go, so limbered up my fingers and carefully unfolded the first wad, and then the second. Pretty much right away it was obvious that the wad wasn’t an early loading as I noticed the print ‘Phone 449’! More unfolding showed that this part of the paper was the Theater section and the date Thursday, Nov 16., and also some movies. One was titled ‘Stolen Plumage” with Henry Murdoch, neither of which I’d ever heard of before, but a quick internet search turned it up easily as a one reel comedy released in Oct 1916! One of the other movies listed was titled ‘Here and There’ and was also released in Oct 1916. A calendar search shows that Thursday, Nov 16 happened in 1916, and not again until 1922, so things are pointed toward the wadding being from a 1916 newspaper!



 Yikes, 1916! This gun was made about 1820/30! But the last time it was loaded was sometime after Thursday, November 16, 1916!
Loaded with less than 50 grains of powder, loaded light for a bird or maybe a rabbit. Or loaded light (see the last picture) due to the 6 inch long repaired split midway down the barrel!  

 

 I don’t know, but don’t doubt that the gun was used like this, as this type of repair had been in use for at least a couple hundred years. But no way to know for sure at this point.
I thought some of you guys might be interested in seeing this.

John                                                                                        

[PIKELAKE]

Thanks for the post. Fascinating!    JZ

[Ky-Flinter]

What an adventure!  Thanks for documenting it.

-Ron

[Dennis Glazener]

I am going to have to try one of those period correct loads. Now where can I find a 1916 newspaper

[Avlrc]

Time capsule in a barrel. How cool is that....

[Majorjoel]

Very cool John! I think it is called barrel archeology!  For 1916 that lead shot still looks darn good. Even better that some of the shot I have laying around the shop. No white oxidation coating it!  I bet it was in an air tight vacuum or a southern California haze for all those years.   Thank you for taking the time to show us.  

[Bill Paton]

JTR, the Happy Gun Sleuth! Great work, John.

[old george]

Isn't history just fascinating

george

[WadePatton]

I am going to have to try one of those period correct loads. Now where can I find a 1916 newspaper

Under the wallpapers of most any real old house.  Usually right before demolition or during remodeling.  

________

Great job excavating the artifacts.

I AM MOST IMPRESSED by the barrel patchwork.  This i gotta learn more about.  Thanks!

[JTR]

I am going to have to try one of those period correct loads. Now where can I find a 1916 newspaper

Dennis, I'll loan you this one,,, if you send it back!  

John

[DaveM]

Hey John - that's really interesting.  Amazing that paper is almost 100 yrs old!  You got me checking a few gun barrels - i have an original flint pistol probably pre 1750 that appears it may be loaded!  It looks like some wadded up cloth extending about 2 inches up the barrel from the breech.  I won't do your plug removal method though - any other ideas to extract it? Or maybe i should leave it for another generation to explore

[Levy]

I unloaded a 12 gauge percussion dbl by R. Hughes some years ago that was still loaded with shot and newspaper wadding.  The newspaper mentioned that a local girl was joining the Ziegfeld Follies.

[Nate McKenzie]

DaveM- Please don't leave it loaded. It could go off and kill or mame one of your future relatives.

[PPatch]

That is just neat! Thank you for the pix and excavation work. (yeah, I know)  

My mom owned some land in N. Georgia at one time and there was a two-room ramshackle log cabin on it - A friend and I visited it one day and behind some paneling boards found the walls plastered with old newspaper from 1864-65, lots of Civil War reporting. You had to leave it be though because as soon as you touched it turned to flakes.

dave

ADD: those barrel repairs are rather odd looking, wonder what the "repair" was all about?

[JTR]

Glad you guys enjoyed this! I'm going to keep the wad newspaper, shot and powder together in a plastic tube and keep it with the gun.

Wade, the patch isn't visible in the interior of the barrel. I would guess the barrel is about 1/8" thick at that point, so maybe the stabilizing pieces are just inlays. Some pounding on the exterior is obvious, as the barrel isn't round any longer in that area.

DaveM, Treat the gun as loaded, but most of the loaded ones I've unloaded were loaded with dirt, mud, wasp nests, etc. You could drip a little water down into the bore to see if whatever softens up. If not, just blow some air in the bore to dry it out.

Thanks for all the comments!
John

[JTR]

PPatch,

Obviously I don't know what caused the crack in the barrel, but I guess at the time repairing it was the best, or maybe an acceptable, option. If you Zoom in on the picture
( Ctrl / + keys ) you can readily see the crack wandering along through the repair patches.

A friend has an original rifle with a split down one of the barrel flats, that was repaired as well.

Joel, The wads were still in there tight, so it was more or less air tight for all those years. Also, the hammer has been snapped so much that the nipple is pounded down closed and flattened out. The hammer snapping was likely kids playing cowboys and injuns,,,,,

John   

[Majorjoel]

Now John, my ever loving curiosity would sure like to see the rest of this old fowler .

[GrampaJack]

I bought 6 very old brass 12 ga. shells at a show today. The shot had been removed but the wad was still there and so was the powder.  When I dug the wads out under them was a second wad made out of newspaper.  These shells are dark and appear to have the original primer although I'm no expert on that. Unfortunately the paper is so small all I could make out was a couple words so no way to date them.  Pretty cool that this thread is running and I find this. Jack

[mr. no gold]

Jtr said that as soon as he can decipher the name of the theater, he's going to down and get in line to see the movie. Way to go, John! Quite a find to be sure; kind of gives an oblique answer to some of the questions about how long these guns were used, and perhaps an extrapolation on how long they were made, i.e. if they were still being shot, someone very likely was still making a few somewhere.
There is a superfine Henry Albright, early, Lancaster rifle in 'as found' condition that has butterfly repairs over a crack in the barrel on the top quarter flat near the breech, left side. What is really neat is the set of initials that were stamped at the repair site. Did the barrel maker use this device to warrant that the barrel was good?
I have a plain ole Beyer gun that has three inches of something in the breech. Looks like sand, but don't think that this one very went to the beach. 
Dick

[John A. Stein]

Nessecity is also the mother of risk, or of confidence. I have an old Colt C&B revolver with a split all along the top of the barrel at the rear end that has a piece welded over it. John

[KLMoors]

What a cool find. Thanks for taking the time to post this.

[JTR]

Answering no golds comment, I never was able to determine the name of the theater, so won't be able to watch the movie,, darn!

But, I did wonder if the powder was still viable, so put a small pinch on a platter, and touched a match to it. Almost instantaneously it went Whoosh, into a small cloud of smoke! The speed with which the powder caught and burned surprised me. I've done this before with old powder and usually it seems to have to warm up a bit before catching. Maybe Major Joel's thought of the load being fairly air tight was correct!
The other strange thing is that the burned powder smelled a little different that modern powder. A bit more acrid. Interesting.

Joel, sorry, but I put the ol thing away without getting a picture.

John

[Hudnut]

Back in the '70s, I unloaded a Barnett HBC trade gun.  Loaded as a shotgun, with newspaper wadding.  The top corner of the page had been used.  Nov. 13, 1924.  The powder was clean and dry.  If someone had snapped a cap, it would have fired.

[longrifle]

This is a very interesting post I enjoyed reading it. Thanks for posting.