LOOSE CREEK — When Brady Iven of Freeburg inherited an old family muzzleloader, he had no interest in turning it into a wall decoration. He wanted to hunt with it, but there was one significant problem.

The rifle — identified by the Iven family as having belonged to pioneer Peter Iven — had survived a house fire and reached Brady in roughly five pieces.

“It was passed down,” Iven said. “I actually got it from my uncle Randy.”

Brady said a great-uncle had given the rifle to his grandfather because he wanted it to remain in the family. From there, it continued through the generations until eventually reaching Brady.

By then, it needed considerably more than cosmetic work.

Iven located a craftsman who made his living building and restoring black-powder rifles. The barrel was sent to Pennsylvania, where it was rebored and re-rifled. A new wooden stock was carved, while the rifle’s original metalwork was refinished and fitted back into place.

“They touched up the engravings that needed it, got everything laid back into the stock and put back together,” Iven said, adding that the work was not quick.

A lengthy wait for the barrel contributed to a restoration process that stretched to roughly three years from the time Brady dropped off the rifle until he received it back.

Before the work began, however, the gunsmith asked Brady an important question.

Did he want a wall-hanger, or did he intend to use the rifle?

“I said, ‘No. I want to get a deer,’” Iven recalled.

That answer determined the direction of the restoration.

Although Brady was already an experienced hunter, the antique black-powder rifle was new territory for him.

He eventually carried it during Missouri’s regular firearms deer season and hunted on his property near Freeburg.

The result was precisely what he had envisioned when he decided to restore it: he bagged a good-sized doe.

Brady and his brother dragged the deer from the property and processed the meat themselves. “That was all we wanted to do,” he said.

There was another surprise before the hunt.

Despite the extensive work performed on the rifle — including rebore and re-rifling of the barrel — Brady said he never had to adjust the sights. “I put two shots right in the bullseye, 30 yards away, and never had to touch them,” he said.

The successful hunt gave the rifle something uncommon among historic family objects: another chapter.

Rather than simply preserving something that had belonged to an ancestor, Brady had used it for essentially the same purpose for which it had originally been built.

He does not intend to push the old firearm unnecessarily, however.

Brady said his understanding is that the barrel was made using an older wrapped-steel method. Looking inside with a borescope, he can still see what appears to be the line where the steel was joined.

“It looks like the barrel’s cracked,” he said, although the rifle remains usable. “I just don’t want to break it. I don’t want to push the limits.”

He expects to continue shooting it occasionally, but with lighter loads and some restraint.

“I got done what I wanted to do with it,” he said, noting the goal had never been complicated. “The only thing I had in mind was shooting a deer with it.”

Three years of restoration work later, generations after the rifle first entered the Iven family, he did exactly that.