Curiosity: Front View

Old houses like ours that have been in the same family for four or five generations are bound to contain a few curiosities – those kinds of things that no one knows much about and that more-or-less fade into the woodwork.

We have one of those items that lives behind the hall door in our east room – the room that is temporarily Nyel’s hospital room. Usually that door remains open and we don’t see the back of it, but these days it is right in Nyel’s line of vision as he lies recovering in his spiffy hospital bed with its ever-changing air mattress.

Curiosity: Side View

This curiosity hangs from a hook and was placed there, I’m pretty sure, by my father in the 1970s when he repainted the woodwork in that room. I remember specifically when he painted the door because it still had the penciled notations made by my grandfather when he measured me on the day I arrived each summer. It was the record of my height from the time I was two until I was well into my teens. Dad carefully transferred those marks to a board that is probably somewhere in the garage at this very moment. But… I digress.

I imagine that Dad found this ‘door hanging’ in one of the boxes in the barn or attic and thought it would make a great decoration for the room that he and Mom had begun to call the “Victorian Room.” I have no idea of its provenance and I doubt that the folks did either.

Strapless Powder Horn

It is shield shaped, ten by eleven inches at its widest and longest points, respectively. It made of wood and covered with a red felt or velvet fabric in front and perhaps linen in the back. . Three cow horns are screwed to it – two larger ones adorned with decorative brads on top and a much smaller horn bottom center. Between them is a sleeve through which something could be placed for hanging up.

Nyel has always thought that it was a sort of gun rack. “It could hold a gun in the sleeve, a man’s hat and maybe a jacket on the larger horns and you could hang a powder horn from the bottom. So we tried it out.

I fetched the bb gun (Osa isn’t the only treasure we inherited from Roy via Gordon), my Goodwill cowgirl hat, and would have retrieved the powder horn from the curio-display-coffee-table as well, but it long ago lost any strap that could have been used to hang it.  After putting them all in place… voilà!

I do believe Nyel is right. As usual!