Behind the Exhibition: Powder Horns

In the eighteenth century, colonists used hollowed-out vessels made from ox or cattle horns to carry their gunpowder for a flintlock musket. Fitted with a plug at the base and a stopper in the spout, the curved form of the powder horn fit around the waist of its user comfortably when worn with a long strap over the shoulder.

Powder horns were also works of art, engraved with ornate designs and inscriptions made by their owners or professional artisans working in military camps as early as the 1740s. On the most basic level, decorated powder horns were a means of personal identification for soldiers. They also served as canvases for soldiers to document the world around them. Popular decorations ranged from geographic maps and military forts to animals and whimsical creatures. Horns carved during the Siege of Boston (1775-1777) depicted fortifications, city views, and encampments in Roxbury, Charlestown, and Cambridge; soldiers marching and engaged in battle; and plenty of patriotic imagery. This decorative tradition lasted until the Continental Army, led by George Washington, began equipping troops with cartridge boxes for loading gunpowder, diminishing the need to carry a horn.

After the American Revolution, veterans and their families preserved powder horns as souvenirs of military service. Carved decorative horns told stories of the owners’ involvement in military campaigns, and their descendants sometimes added notes to uncarved horns to document the provenance. By the early twentieth century, fake horns flooded the collector’s market, either carved to resemble eighteenth-century decoration or sold with falsified histories.

While Historic New England does not typically collect military artifacts, powder horns blur the lines between decorative folk art, souvenir, and militaria. As I was putting together Myth and Memory: Stories of the American Revolution, I encountered at least a dozen examples in the collection, each with their own unique histories, but only three powder horns had explicit connections to the American Revolution. I approached these powder horns with a skeptical eye, wondering if I could verify their revolutionary attributions. The object files were not very helpful, as all of them were donated by collectors between the 1920s-1940s with little documentation.

With scant provenance, I turned to the objects themselves to see what they revealed.

The first powder horn features engravings of animals, architecture, and miscellaneous designs. The horn also bears the inscription “IAMES REILEY” (James Reiley) rendered in a bold calligraphic style. The donor was Miss Margaret Wyman and the horn belonged to her grandfather, although there appears to be no direct family relation to James Reiley. In his correspondence, William Sumner Appleton described the carving as “one of the simpler variety, probably the work of some New England farmer.”

There are a few features that help attribute this horn to the Siege of Boston: the large, bold lettering of James Reiley’s name relates to a decorative carving tradition attributed to John Bush, a free man of color from Shrewsbery, Massachusetts, who served at Fort William Henry in New York. Bush’s decorated powder horns served as inspiration for artists and amateur carvers in the 1770s.

Reiley’s horn also has attachments that Joel Bohy (a consultant for the National Park Service) identified as belonging to an artillery priming horn for a cannon, including the sling swivel mounted to the horn. Sling swivels allowed users to attach a sling to the powder horn, and Joel identified the unique shape as having once belonged to a British musket. It was likely adapted by Reiley for his powder horn.

The final piece of the puzzle was the name itself. Knowing that this horn was used in an artillery company, I could use veterans records available through Ancestry.com to locate James Reiley in the archive. I believe the owner of this horn is a James Reiley who served in Colonel John Crane’s Continental Artillery Regiment. Reiley participated in military campaigns in New England, New York, and New Jersey. His name was on a list of men mustered by Nathaniel Barber, Muster Master for Suffolk Co., in 1777.

The second horn is bare, with a note inscribed in ink on the body: “Powder Horn used in Revolution / owned by Tuck Family / of Nashua.” Stephen T. Moore donated the horn in 1941, but there appears to be no ancestral tie to anyone named Tuck, nor to the state of New Hampshire.

The diminutive size of this horn raised a flag; likely too small for the army, but might have been used for hunting. I was also unable to track down a “Tuck” from the Nashua area who served in the American Revolution. It’s possible that this Tuck lived elsewhere, and the family later moved to Nashua; it is also possible that the Tuck family acquired the horn as a relic and labeled it for posterity. Either way, its military attribution is shaky. The handwritten note was probably reason enough for Stephen Moore to collect and donate it to Historic New England in the early twentieth century.

The third powder horn does its best to convince you of its history: “JUNE 17, 1775/ W. WILAND/ LEXINGTON/ HIS HORN/ CHARLESTOWN” is carved on the body, along with an engraving of a soldier planting a flag on a hill. However, this horn screams “fake,” from the crude carvings to the lack of any documentation of a “W. Wiland” ever living in Lexington, let alone serving in the Massachusetts Army. This horn was made to attract a collector, likely in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. It was apparently good enough to dupe Wickliffe Draper, who donated the horn to Historic New England in 1934.

Taken together, these three powder horns highlight the major themes of the Myth and Memory exhibition. I decided to display them together and tell their stories to show how history, memory, and mythology coalesce in the collecting and preservation of artifacts from the American Revolution.