To restore or not?!

[RAP]

Hello,
I have a 12ga. that appears to be a PH, serial 59688, twist built in 1890. I inherited it and started looking on gun auction sites and noticed my gun is not "clean" as the others. Also, the stock is smooth vs. most have "grips" engraved into the wood. Sorry for a total lack of knowledge on my part - I found the site and thought you guys/gals may be able to help.
Also, found the letter T and the serial numbers on 2 places.
Any idea of value?
Thanks!

[RAP]

Any idea, as I will be placing the gun on the market. I can send pitures if needed.

Thanks for the information.

[Jack Cronkhite]

Pictures will be useful. In focus is important. Close-up detail is useful. If you are comfortable to remove the barrels, then pictures of all the stampings on the metal will be helpful.

[Don Kaas]

An early PH 12 gauge in what sounds like very well worn condition might sell for $500-600 cash at a gunshow if the barrels are in shootable conditions (many aren't...) These guns are not rare, not very collectible but they are Parkers.

[Harry Collins]

A PH that has been handed down through the family and has little monitary value might be something to hang on to. It is worn and shiny from the hands of your ancestry. Not something I would want to hide or try to refresh. Just something you might want to think about. The rest of us have Parkers because someone in the "family" let them go. Not many here purchsed one new. For myself, I would rather have a Parker with honest wear than one that has been restored.

Kindest, Harry

[rogross]

I have my great grandfather's Parker, 12 ga., double barrel hammer gun. Serial # 2080; approx 1874. I need the right hammer, or a pair that will replace. Hammer Screws too, if anyone has them.
As a young, dumb, kid, I played with it constantly, and lost the right hammer down between the floor boards of my attic bedroom. I was afraid to tell my dad. Now at the age of 63, I know my dad would not have been mad; he would have taught me how to fish for it with a hooked piece of wire.

[Dean Romig]

Rogross, you need to go to the attic and lift that floor board and retrieve the hammer.

Myself and the minister's son, who was my best friend when I was 9 or 10, lifted a loose floor board in the attic of the parsonage where he lived and found, wrapped in old oil cloth, seven muskets & flintlocks hidden there almost two centuries earlier.

[rogross]

CORRECTION: The Parker 12 ga, for which I need the right hammer; the serial number is 0807, pre 1874. I was reading the number upsidedown.

[rogross]

Wish I could go back to the house and pull the floor board, but the house was demolished 45 years ago.

[Richard Flanders]

Dean: how more of that story?! I have always dreamed of coming on an ancient Alaskan cabin with a nice old .50-110 takedown Winchester '86 hidden under a bed wrapped in oil cloth or some protective case. Never has happened and I've looked and dug into a LOT of ancient broken down cabins and found a lot of neat stuff, just never a gun. Ammo yes... but that Winchester still eludes me...

[Dean Romig]

I guess when you're in the Alaskan bush you just don't leave your rifle in the cabin . . . ever.
These old muskets and flintlocks, I surmise, were intentionally hidden in the attic of the parsonage back when America was young and the Revolution was a fresh memory. Danvers, Ma. was very near the epicenter of the "Birthplace of Freedom" for a new nation. After all, who would suspect a "man of the cloth" would harbor instruments of death and destruction? Certainly nobody . . . until two ten-year-old boys innocently uncovered them. We had no idea if they were charged as we took a few of them out in the woods behind the parsonage to play "guns". I do remember leaving one of them in a field behind Dwight Skidmore's house. We never retreived it and it may be there yet, some fifty years later . . . I wonder if Gunk will remove that rust :eek: