Dinner with George Washington

Being George Washington meant dealing with a constant stream of visitors.  Some were invited, many were not.  Some stayed an hour, others stayed several days.  A true gentleman required sufficient accouterments to properly entertain such hoards.  Washington kept up appearances with the latest fashions from England – except during those years when imports from London dropped off dramatically.

Washington bought hefty batches of fashionable English salt glazed white stoneware through his purchasing agent Thomas Knox in Bristol long before an independent America took top spot in the Chinese porcelain trade.  One order alone was for 6 dozen “finest white stone plates,” 1 dozen “finest dishes in 6 different sizes,” 48 “patty pans” in 4 sizes, 12 butter dishes and 12 mustard pots, plus mugs, teapots, slop basins, etc.

Salt glazed white stoneware appeared during the 1730’s, once the necessary materials were available.  Specifically, rock salt from Cheshire (after 1670), white ball clays from Devon and Dorset (after 1720) and calcined flint.  Just as this fine grained clay body came into use, so too did plaster molds.  By 1740 press molded salt white stoneware was all the rage.  It was cheaper than porcelain and sturdier than delft.  Salt white soon toppled delftware’s predominance – and was just as quickly supplanted by creamware. 

Thus marked the inception of the “dinnerware set” and the quantum leap from craft pottery to factory production.  Once cracks appeared in porcelain’s allure, China’s fortunes also waned.

Back at Mt. Vernon Washington’s order arrived, leading him to fire off a note to Knox on January 8, 1758:  “The Crate of Stone ware don’t contain a third of the pieces I am charg’d with, and only two things broke, and every thing very high charg’d.”  Despite this, another order followed:  “½ doz’n dep white stone Dishes sort’d” and “3 doz’n Plates deep and Shallow.”  (Deep = soup bowl, shallow = dinner plate.)

The January 8 note hints at another, more practical, reason for such large orders.   Pots jammed into wooden crates and tossed into ships’ holds for transatlantic shipment could suffer considerable breakage.  Buyers needed plenty of ‘spare parts.’

Salt white’s history is interesting, but that last comment gives pause for thought.  If potters today didn’t go bubble wrap crazy when packing for UPS, how would that affect our average order size?

 

Readings:
Ceramics in America.  Ian Quimby, Ed.  University Press of Virginia/Charlottesville.  1972.

If These Pots Could Talk.  Ivor Noel Hume.  University Press of New England/Hanover, NH.  2001.

Salt Glazed Stoneware in Early America.  Janine Skerry and Suzanne Findlen Hood.  University Press of New England/Hanover, NH.  2009.

 

Technorati Tags: George Washington,Revolutionary War,salt glazed white stoneware,China trade porcelain,East India Company,patty pans,delftware,Industrial Revolution,creamware,Mt. Vernon,dinnerware set,dinner plate,soup bowl,UPS

NASCAR

“War is hell.”  – William Tecumseh Sherman.

Automobiles excited speed freaks from the beginning.  But Prohibition bumped things up a notch.  Young men raced bootleg whiskey to backwoods delivery points.  When Prohibition ended the drivers didn’t want to stop.  One thing led to another and racing became a “sport.”  They raced each other for small stakes.  Once money got involved it became NASCAR.

The whiskey those early daredevils drove around came in salt-fired stoneware jugs.  This scenario was officially sanctioned a few brief decades before, with far reaching consequences for everyone involved.

The Civil War had ravished farms across the South.  Barns were burned and cattle herds were decimated.  Reconstruction efforts like the 1870’s Farm Alliance Program promoted corn production as a cash crop for whiskey distillation.  There simply wasn’t much livestock to feed.  Whiskey boomed.  So did the need for jugs to put it in.

One immediate consequence was that local potters couldn’t keep up with demand.  Quality predictably declined when so many newcomers flooded the market.  Many of these new potters were itinerants.  The very best were called “500 gallon men” due to the quantity they could produce in a day.  But many others were just “whiskey heads” who breezed into shops, made a few bucks, blew it all on whiskey, and drifted off again.

The stoneware whiskey jug boom also impelled several important technical innovations.  Albany slip came into common use, sealing somewhat porous jugs and protecting their precious contents.  As production grew, kilns evolved.  Some potters stayed true to their old groundhog kilns but others needed more stacking space and more consistent firing.  Kilns got shorter, taller and more fuel efficient.

During Prohibition, revenue officers looking for bootleggers would see shops filled with jugs one day and empty the next.  “Where did those jugs go?”  “I didn’t catch his name…”  Cleater Meaders of White County, Georgia remembers “Most of the liquor ended up in Atlanta or Athens – university people got most of it.”

After Prohibition, visitors from cities like Atlanta and Athens sought out rustic ceramic ‘tourist items.’  The stage was set for Jugtown and all that followed.  Meanwhile the young bootlegging drivers sped off to their own destiny.

OK, so it can’t be said that pottery alone created NASCAR.  But pottery was a crucial ingredient there at the beginning.

Readings:
Raised in Clay, The Southern Pottery Tradition (1984).  Sweezy, Nancy.  Smithsonian Institution Press/Washington DC.

Turners and Burners.  Charles Zug.  University of North Carolina Press/Chapel Hill, NC.  1986.

Technorati Tags: Automobiles,NASCAR,Prohibition,Civil War,Reconstruction,Farm Alliance Program,whiskey,bootlegging,whiskey,

salt fired stoneware,jugs,Albany slip,groundhog kiln,Cleater Meaders,Jugtown

The Mudlark

Rivers make excellent garbage cans.  Never in humanity’s 150,000 years has anyone had to think otherwise.  Never, until now.  So imagine the educational effort it’ll take to get Earth’s 7 billion people to do a 180̊ degree switch in just one generation. 

Still, some find advantage in garbage problems.  Like the dung beetle.  Or the mudlark.

The mudlark trolls about in riverbank muck looking for tiny fragments of treasure.  The Thames estuary around London, a major port with an ancient history, is a particularly rich source.  Tidal fluctuations constantly churn up centuries of junk.  Something new can be found on any given day.

18th and 19th century mudlarks collected junk for its resale value.  It was an extremely low end job to be sure, but it offered the possibility for a modicum of self-sufficiency.  By 1900 mudlark scavenging was no longer a legally sanctioned profession. 

Today there is a whole new population subset of mudlarks.  Professional and amateur archeology “garbologists” wade out, seeking to tell humanity’s story through it’s garbage.  But there are serious rules about modern mudlarking.  Anything completely above ground is fair game.  Anything that requires digging, even simply turning something over, requires permits.  Anything truly valuable must be reported.

A mudlark can easily amass buckets full of pottery shards, from Roman samian ware to Walmart rejects.  It takes a special person to recognize this mish-mash for the treasure it is.  But anyone who loves a good detective story should ask serious mudlarks about their finds.  See how they tease out stories from tantalizing tidbits.

Tens of thousands of little scraps of information.  Each is a tiny window peeking directly back into the past.  When put together, they form an impressive mosaic.

Readings
London.  Edward Rutherford.  Ballantine Books/London.  2002.

If These Pots Could Talk.  Ivor Noel Hume.  University Press of New Hampshire/Dover, NH.  2001.

 

Technorati Tags: mudlark,pollution,Thames,London,dung beetles,pottery shards,archeology,garbology,samian ware