Add One More To My Collection

Last October, I wrote about some odd stuff I found in the house, mostly in the attic, including an old iron carpenter's stamp with a number 6 / number 9 on it.

Yesterday, while randomly prowling around under some attic floorboards, I found another old stamp, this one a number 5, amidst the dessicated corn cobs and acorn caps left behind by squirrelly visitors of the past:



Needless to say, there's quite a bit of debris in my joist bays. Soon, I'm going to begin cleaning it all out. But like every other project here, there's a need to proceed slowly, like an archeologist, sifting carefully through the rubble for things revealing of house history.

Just for the sake of comparison, here's my complete set of modern, hand-cut, 3/8" steel stamps (just a tad smaller than the stamps I've found, which are 1/2"). I like working with all manner of traditional tools, whether true antiques, or modern equivalents. These were made by the Hitt Marking Devices folks, in California/Arizona:



So, stay tuned for more postings on the massive attic exploration and clean-out effort, and we'll see what other sorts of things we come up with. I'm still hopeful, by the way, that there's an old musket hidden somewhere. I know it's there -- it's just a matter of time before I find it... :-)