A
Anonymous
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Found this brass or bronze object while detecting on an old farm with my 1500 a couple of weekends ago. The V nickel is for scale.
At first I thought it was a powder measure for an old musket and the little hole is where the handle was attached. (I have found dozens of musket balls on the farm) but it is just too big for that. If you put that much black powder in a musket you would probably blow the barrel up.
At first the farmer thought it might be a cap for an ox horn as they can get pretty sharp and folks do put metal caps on them. The little hole would be a place where a little brad or nail was used to attach it to the ox horn. I have found several ox shoes on the farm too so we do know that they used oxen on it back in colonial times (they used horses mostly though - the old harnesses for draft horses are still in the barn). However the more Rob, the farmer, thinks about it the less he likes the idea of an ox horn cap. He says it would have been much more likely that they just sawed the tips off and that a bronze horn cap was too fancy for a working farm back when they would have been using oxen for draft animals.
Anyone else have any ideas about this ?
BTW I got a great "find" at the farm last weekend. The corn is coming in and the farmer told me to go help myself to some ears of corn when I was done detecting. I only live a 5 minute walk from the farm so I roasted some of that corn still in the husk the second I got home - nothing quite like sweet corn picked 10 minutes before you cook it up. It was the tastiest detecting find I have come across yet <img src="/metal/html/biggrin.gif" border=0 width=15 height=15 alt="
">
At first I thought it was a powder measure for an old musket and the little hole is where the handle was attached. (I have found dozens of musket balls on the farm) but it is just too big for that. If you put that much black powder in a musket you would probably blow the barrel up.
At first the farmer thought it might be a cap for an ox horn as they can get pretty sharp and folks do put metal caps on them. The little hole would be a place where a little brad or nail was used to attach it to the ox horn. I have found several ox shoes on the farm too so we do know that they used oxen on it back in colonial times (they used horses mostly though - the old harnesses for draft horses are still in the barn). However the more Rob, the farmer, thinks about it the less he likes the idea of an ox horn cap. He says it would have been much more likely that they just sawed the tips off and that a bronze horn cap was too fancy for a working farm back when they would have been using oxen for draft animals.
Anyone else have any ideas about this ?
BTW I got a great "find" at the farm last weekend. The corn is coming in and the farmer told me to go help myself to some ears of corn when I was done detecting. I only live a 5 minute walk from the farm so I roasted some of that corn still in the husk the second I got home - nothing quite like sweet corn picked 10 minutes before you cook it up. It was the tastiest detecting find I have come across yet <img src="/metal/html/biggrin.gif" border=0 width=15 height=15 alt="
">