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: