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Originally Posted by Jim McDougall
The burl wood is characteristic of the beautiful woodwork well known in the furnishings and cabinetry of New England, and the gun stocks of the famed long rifles.
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The grain structure points to maple, which as you say was a common wood for gunstocks in the northeastern part of America into the first half of the 19th cent. Its use on firearms seems to have faded with the increasing use of machine production. I can speak from experience that the curly grain is quite tricky to shape with edge tools such as planes or spokeshaves; rasps and scrapers work better and perhaps the woodworking machinery of the early industrial era was not up to the delicacy of work that hand-shaping and carving could achieve.