I’m not usually one for gun art but I think this little piece of history mated together with nature is a nifty idea. A Facebook post by Juneau’s Hidden History page featured an Alaskan tree stump loaded up with spent brass casings that completely covered its top surface. The age of both the stump and casings is a mystery as some of the cases have gone out of commercial production since before WWII.

Old Alaskan Tree Stump Loaded with Empty Cases

The stump was found near an old lumber mill used to build a very large dam back round 1915. Juneau was and still is a very small town but had a very lucrative gold mining operation which was the primary reason for its founding. However, a lot of the brass casings found inside of this stump can more give us a good idea of how old the stump actually is. Some of the cases like the .25-35 WCF are pretty old and now considered to be obsolete (.25-35 WCF was widely considered to be too weak to hunt anything other than deer).

Other cartridges found inside the stump include .45 Colt, .45-90 WCF, .30-30 Winchester, 303 British, and even .22LR. This leads me to believe that the cut stump and many of the cases could be well over 100 years old. There is no telling what type of tree was used exactly for this piece of firearms art but the forest near the area where the stump was found is primarily made up of Western Hemlock, Sitka Spruce, and Western Red and Yellow cedar trees. My guess would it would be a cedar tree since the stump and casings are pretty old and cedar tends to be fairly rot-resistant.

To quote Indiana Jones – “It belongs in a museum!” I think if this stump were carefully removed, preserved, and moved into a firearms-related museum like the Cody Firearms Museum or the NRA Museum, it would make a neat piece of firearms history even if just for the examples of some of the older cartridges found inside of the stump.

All Photos of the Stump by Alaskanweed Photography