These photographs show a homemade powder horn that was left in the old Daniel Korns, Jr. Somerset County PA house when John Wilson Korns died and his son Allen Korns took over the family farm. The top photo was taken in 2001. The strap peg has a shoulder so it can't fall inside the horn, and has a cross-pin inside so it can't fall out.
My grandmother Gladys Edna (Bittner) Korns gave this powder horn to me in the 1960s, and I passed it on to a younger member of the family in 2022. When I talked to Lester Korns in the summer of 1997, he reported that Wilse Korns didn't much like guns, and had only a cartridge shotgun for himself. Lester noted that Wilse Korns wouldn't permit his son Allen to even have a gun as a boy. (Allen secretly asked Lester to help him save up for one, and eventually they saved enough money to buy a .22 single shot rifle, which Allen hid under a board in the barn so his father Wilson wouldn't know about it. Allen was still keeping a gun in the barn when the barn burned down in 1923; He told me that the fire destroyed a four-barrel pistol which he used on his trapline.) Knowing Wilse's general aversion to guns, and knowing that he himself had a cartridge shotgun rather than a muzzle loader--at least in the early 1900's, suggests that the powder horn shown here may date back to Wilse's father Daniel Korns, Jr., however all that can be said with certainty is that the horn did at one time definitely belong to Mr. and Mrs. John Wilson Korns.
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