EH
 

Finally got around to taking a picture of the four EH guns residing at my house ! All be it a sub standard picture a picture none the less . At the top a circa 1904 34” , second from top a circa 1899 32” , second frombthe bottom a circa 1889 30” and at the bottom a circa 1891 28” .

Now to find factory original EH in 26 and 24 inches !

Very nice! But you knew I thought that

Thank you sir !

What a nice collection of "big guns." I hope to take a turkey this Fall with my EH. Good luck with your search for short barreled versions. It's nice to be on a quest, eh?

Thanks but I doubt I find the 24” as they only show 6 or 7 in the book , that’s not to say there weren’t more but I doubt it to be over twenty at best . The book shows 26” EH at 12 or 13 I think so perhaps with the serial numbers missing there could be maybe thirty of them . But then “the book” showed fifteen I think of the 34” and I lucked into one of them ( I suspect the number of unknown 34” to be greater then the short ones). Good luck with the gobble birds , I’m afraid my hunting this year may take a strong hit as family obligations may keep me out of the woods altogether .

Craig, sorry to hear you may miss out on some hunting. I hope things work out well for you and your family.

As for the quest, in the oft-repeated mantra of the PGCA, "Never Say Never!" I bought a 16 hammer gun at an auction, and a year later, lucked into another one. Upon checking serial numbers, I found that they were sequential. I'll take luck when I can get it, so maybe you'll find those short-barreled EHs before you know it. Just imagine the picture of all of them lined up...

Lord a 24” EH would be awesome , I “expect” it’s safe to assume they were relatively open . So that would make the perfect “Archibald Rutledge” deer drive gun with my handloads of 0 or #1 buck . Of course I’d need to get in a group or club and I ain’t really a deer club kinda hunter LOL’s!

Craig,

I'm also not a deer club hunter, but when I was young, growing up on the Peninsula of VA (in the Williamsburg, Jamestown, Yorktown area) my Dad got us into a "club" of sorts that included guys from our church. It was really a poor man's deer club, with only about 400 acres, but those acres were adjacent to the Colonial Parkway and Cheatam Annex. We did not run dogs on such a small holding, but every now and then the Club "leader" (the guy that knew the judge who owned the land and got us permission to hunt there) would use a beagle to push the deer from an overgrown field. I was just a kid, but I remember the feeling when a deer bounded just ahead of that short-legged beagle. There was a big club that had holdings on what is now Busch Gardens near Williamsburg. I do recall going with Pop to watch a hunt. It was the full-blown pack-of-hounds-running-deer-by-standers affair. We were just observers, but my childhood memories were some of the best of those early days. I, too, am a fan of Rutledge, and I looked into the prospects of buying into a hunt over hounds in the Southern tradition. I've not found anything available, but I do sometimes dream of using one of my Parkers (I think my EH might be too tightly choked) on such a hunt. I really don't care to kill another deer, but it would sure be nice to conjure up something of the tradition...especially with a Parker.

I hope you find that 24" EH! Let us know when you do.

I usually hunt with some friends the last couple days of the season in Boswells Tavern in Louisa County . And one year we were doing man drives in s River bottom , they pushed a little buck to me . I was carrying a circa 1892 Parker GH 12 gauge 28” loaded with home cast and loaded slug in the right barrel and home loaded 0 buck in the left barrel . The little buck strolled up and stopped , I was sitting on a log , put the gun up and plunked in the neck with the slug . End of story dead right there it was a lasered 26 yards !