I found an old mount in a barn in Oregon, It turned out to be a columbia whitetail, which are now on the endangerd spices list. Also the new state record. scored 1536/8 .
On the back of the plaque, it said it was killed in 1910, in Columbia county. The cape was shot, so I took it apart and found, lead sheet earliners, solid glass eyes. The full skull was attatched to a 1" X 2" rough cut stick, going down to a second round board with 2 large holes in it. The neck was stuffed with moss, it looked as if the taxidermist used wet moss and packed the neck full and then tipped it up on the round board or backplate if you will, to let the water run out. The cape was nailed every 2" around this back plate.
In the sinus cavity was a piece of cedar hand carved to resemble a nose, and the cape was tucked in the carved nostrils.
The skull still has chunks of meat, undoubtably dipped in arsenic ?
There was no fill material to replace muscle detail on the skull at all, just the hide over the bone.
Don't know when it was mounted, or by who, does any body know what era this meathod was used, or maybe this was just one's own meathod.
Just wanted to share this antique masterpiece, Have a nice day, Tim
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Perhaps it was a masterpiece of a set of antlers created by mother nature, but if it was a real masterpiece of a deer mmount it probably wouldn't have been put in a Barn and kept in the house.
To age a given deer by a composit of the parts therein is nigh impossible. Since the deer had a recorded date of kill, it could be surmised that it was prepared within the year it was shot. The routine of freezing hides prior to preparation was not even discovered, and tanning of hides was not often used at that time. Often a hide was salted and dried, then placed in a pickle for months before it was rubbed with alum, or immersed in an alum solution. Tanning was never a routine method in 1910. Without the date of collection, it could not be acertained to date from 1890 to 1970 even. Elwood continued to describe using the entire skull with a 2x4 block of wood and wrapped excelsior right up to my 1969 version of his lessons which were essentially unchanged from his circa 1910 version. (the earlier version printed from circa 1903 to 1910 though he didn't copyrite it until 1905, and listed 1905 even on the 1910 version which had its first change in 1931, again in 1935 etc.)
Anyway - lead earliners were used as early as 1880 in the US and is still used today by some. The solid glass eyes are new to me. I have an 1889 Zebra eye from a mount which was hollow and the shape of a gumball, hand painted inside. All my old catalogues from the turn of the century never had round eyes (I am envisioning marbles for your description). The whole skull was also used up into the 1970's by some. I would doubt the animal was filled with sphagnum moss while wet, more than likely added dry and stuffed in. The lack of clay is interesting since it had been advocated for thirty previous years to 1910 in American Taxidermy literature.
Elwood and a few others started marketing pre-made head forms for deer around 1910-1913, but rug shells were routine for bears and others well before it, the idea perhaps imported from France (see Boyer, J. 1906. Artistic French Taxidermy. Scientific American 94:272-274) The rugshells which look to be made of paper already have teeth and an artificial toungue in them. Deer heads were not common then though.
The carved nose area is interesting and probably a trademark of that individual artist.
There were much more modern techniques is use by 1910 though. Akeley had been sculpting forms, casting, and building them of plaster and burlap - but not published the technique, and Rowley and Davie had books detailing using Hardware cloth to fill the basic shape in the neck then using paper mache to build up the muscles in 1894 and 1898 books.
I have personal knowledge that Gaither was 37 at that time, so he should know! LOL