This was with two boxes of estate sale tools.

Any ideas?

corn husker???????

Quote from: international3414 on August 15, 2014, 08:07:33 PM
corn husker???????

that's my guess

Yep corn husking peg with what looks like new leather, then again the whole thing looks brand new. Your fingers go through the loops in the strap. The steel peg rests in your palm, grab an ear of corn (dry field corn) and run the steel peg down the husk to split the husk open. This is a common one some of them are patented and bring big bucks $100+. You can find them made from wood, bone, steel and brass.

Wow - I never would have known that one.

It sat in a box for some time (decade or two)

All these years I thought a Cornhusker was over 300 lbs of hard hitting, fast sprinting, red wearing, University of Nebraska student. Oh, and their football playing boyfriends, too.

Learned a new one today!  Thanks all of you.

Chilly

I remember well the first one of those I found! Carried it around for two weeks till I found someone who knew what it was.

yep, I opened a box of tools at the hardware store, said, "What is this?" Everyone looked at me like was dumb as a doornail,  "You aren't serious, are you?" Yes, just tell me what it is already!
Apparently, I'm the only one around here who didn't know what that was!
cheers,
bird

Bird, I'm betting that "everyone" were all guys.   (O;

around here "shucking peg".  shucking = hard work back in the day.  1 these days i'm going to make it to the national contest.

I meant to ad this link b4.

http://www.cornhusking.com/

Dad talked about one fall in the mid-1930s.   He would have been in his 'teens (finished school at 8th grade ) & their crop had failed due to drought.  Someone had 100 acres of corn in the Missouri River bottom near Tekamah, NE that needed picked.  It was a long day's ride away from home with a team & wagon, so his folks picked him up on Saturday afternoon, and brought him back Sunday evening (it was only an hour away from home for the Model T).   He said in a good day you could fill a triple box wagon (roughly 100 bushels of ear corn ), and it took several weeks to get that field picked. 
Use the husking peg (or hook - whatever style you found worked best) to strip the husk back from the ear enough so you could snap the ear off the stalk and have a clean ear to toss into the wagon.   Keeping warm & relatively dry was a challenge.  Early in the morning you had to deal with frost; by afternoon probably mud underfoot & throw in November & December snow.   In corn grown from saved seed you also had  varying stalk heights & sizes -- one ear might be 18 inches off the ground & the next stalk might have its ears well over your head.

A std box wagon held 35 bu and had a higher board on the off side called a Bang Board.  In the 30s a good shucker would get $3.50 a day in Indiana.   Chuck Garrett

I can add to that story about Tekamah, ( it is the only town in the USA with that name), so it has to be Nebraska.   Big farmer, had that field,  and people asked him to leave his shiny new cornpicker parked, and hire some men that desperately needed a few dollars with winter coming on.   He did so, had a large picking crew going for awhile.   Picking by hand isn't so bad if you're quick on your feet to deal with the mud and the cockleburrs, and fox tail grass that likes to twist around your ankles.   Now this was picking standing corn.  Then the cows were turned loose in the fields to clean up any leftovers.   A generation further back the corn was shocked, 10-15 stalks tied in a bundle and left to stand in the field, with their ears intact.   Think fall harvest photos.  Then the bundles were brought in, stacked, and the ears were pulled off, and de-shucked, or just shucked.  The stalk and shuck went to the pigs, the ears were shelled and fed to the chickens and milk cows, and pigs.   Picking ears off of shocked corn while seated isn't so bad, but you need to tie your pant legs shut, or the mice have a tendency to go searching for a new warm winter home. 

and the nubber that was used to knock off the end kernals so you could save the center seeds
on good ears for planting the next years crop.