In 2007, Jeff Bibb attended Dixon’s Gun Makers Fair in Kempton, Pa., with a friend.
Bibb’s friend, a gun maker, was trying to persuade him to take up the craft as well.
As it turns out, his friend didn’t succeed in his quest, although the excursion did inspire Bibb to take up another craft.
More than two years later, Bibb, a retired Amherst native, spends his time re-creating historic powder horns and hunting pouches.
He became fascinated with horns and pouches while seeing a display of them at Dixon’s.
Shortly after, Bibb decided he wanted to make them himself.
“I thought it was time to do something I really wanted to do,” he said.
The designs Bibb saw were re-creations of those carried by hunters and soldiers for hundreds of years before the invention of the automatic rifle.
Back then, Bibb explained, bison horns and leather pouches served as gunpowder carrying cases for men with muzzle-loaders.
Bibb said he tries to be as historically authentic as possible in his designs.
When he designs a pouch or horn, he uses traditional dyes and linen sinew and tries to keep his measurements in line with the originals, which he obtains photographs or copies of for his work, he said.
Bibb was successful in his craft from the beginning.
The first pouch and horn he ever made won first prize at Dixon’s Fair in 2008.
“I was floored when I won. I didn’t have a clue anything I made would be in the same league.”
Next to the other displays at the fair, Bibb didn’t think his creations stood a chance.
They were “simply constructed,” he said.
Bibb said he only re-creates powder horns and pouches from Southern Appalachia and Virginia, primarily because of their simple style.
It’s a style he relates to, having grown up in Amherst on family-owned land dating back to the 1730s.
The land Bibb now lives on once grew his grandfather’s peach and apple orchards, and he still remembers romping around the woods outside his house as child, his grandfather’s smoothbore by his side.
“There’s a lot to be learned from a simpler form of existence,” he said.
Bibb’s latest work, an Eastern Tennessee folk-art horn, hangs in his basement, tagged with another first prize ribbon from Dixon’s.
And despite urgings from gun-making friends, Bibb said that he will not attempt to craft a muzzleloader.
“I’m a real perfectionist,” he said. “If I screwed up a thousand dollar gun, it’s a little different than a 10-dollar piece of leather.”
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