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Title: The Middleton Place Privy House - An Archaeological View of Nineteenth Century Plantation Life
Author: Haskell, Helen Woolford
Language: English
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HOUSE ***
THE MIDDLETON PLACE PRIVY HOUSE
AN ARCHEOLOGICAL VIEW OF NINETEENTH CENTURY PLANTATION LIFE
Helen Woolford Haskell
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA
INSTITUTE OF ARCHEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
POPULAR SERIES 1
Columbia, South Carolina
September, 1981
_The University of South Carolina offers equal opportunity in its
employment, admissions and educational activities, in accordance with
Title IX, section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and other civil
rights laws._
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
List of Figures iv
Acknowledgments vi
A brief history of Middleton Place 1
Archeology at Middleton Place 8
Pottery and porcelain 12
Glass tableware 24
Glass manufacture in the United States 29
Medicine Bottles 34
Wine and spirits bottles 39
Beer bottles 40
South Carolina dispensary bottles 43
Food containers 45
Bottles made after 1900 47
Lamp glass 49
Laboratory glass 52
Conclusions 54
Appendix I—Ceramic manufacturer’s marks 56
Appendix II—Significant dates in the American Glass Industry 58
Appendix III—Marks left by different techniques of bottle
manufacture 62
Appendix IV—Artifact catalogue from the Middleton Place privy
excavation 64
Bibliography 73
LIST OF FIGURES
Page
FIGURE 1: Locator map of Middleton Place 3
FIGURE 2: British-made white ironstone or granite china, 1891-1900 13
FIGURE 3: Chinese export porcelain 14
FIGURE 4: French Bourbon Sprig or Cornflower porcelain 15
FIGURE 5: English porcelain platter 16
FIGURE 6: Creamware sauce tureen 17
FIGURE 7: Light blue transfer-printed serving bowl 19
FIGURE 8: Molded white ironstone chamber pot 19
FIGURE 9: English majolica 21
FIGURE 10: Limoges porcelain 22
FIGURE 11: Decal-printed Austrian porcelain 23
FIGURE 12: Cut glass pitcher 25
FIGURE 13: Cut glass decanters 26
FIGURE 14: Stemmed drinking glasses 27
FIGURE 15: Ale flute and mascotte wine glass 27
FIGURE 16: Bottle shapes from the Middleton Place privy 32
FIGURE 17: Pharmacy bottles 34
FIGURE 18: Patent medicine bottles 36
FIGURE 19: Apothecary’s vials 38
FIGURE 20: Wine and spirits bottles 40
FIGURE 21: Beer bottles 41
FIGURE 22: South Carolina Dispensary bottles 44
FIGURE 23: Preserve jar and olive oil bottle 46
FIGURE 24: Armor beef extract jar 47
FIGURE 25: Twentieth century bottles 48
FIGURE 26: Student lamp chimney 50
FIGURE 27: Kerosene student and piano lamp 51
FIGURE 28: “Pearl top” and crimped lamp chimneys 51
FIGURE 29: Free-blown laboratory beaker 52
FIGURE 30: Conservation of artifacts 55
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank Harvey S. Teal and George B. Hartness of Columbia, South
Carolina; M. Mellanay Delham of Charlotte, North Carolina; Harmon Wray
of Memphis, Tennessee; and Jan B. Eklund of the Smithsonian Museum for
assistance with the artifact analysis. The original research was funded
by a grant from the South Carolina Coastal Council. This publication was
made possible by a grant from the South Carolina Committee for the
Humanities, whose support is gratefully acknowledged. The Middleton
Place Foundation, and its Director, Sarah Lytle, provided advice and
encouragement. The author appreciates the assistance of the staff of the
Institute of Archeology and Anthropology. Essential to the production of
this book were Gordon Brown, Photographer; Darby Erd,
Artist-Illustrator; Kenneth Pinson, Editorial Assistant; Mary Joyce
Burns, Typist; Kenneth Lewis, Archeologist; and William Marquardt,
Associate Director.
Artifacts in the photographs are in possession of the Middleton Place
Foundation, Charleston, South Carolina, and the Institute of Archeology
and Anthropology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South
Carolina.
The cover illustration and drawings on pages 1, 3, 27, 32, 47, 51, 54,
and 56 are by Darby Erd. Figure 16 is taken from illustrations in Norman
W. Webber’s _Collecting glass_ (Arco Publishing, New York, 1973) and
Ruth Webb Lee’s _Victorian glass_ (privately published, Northboro,
Massachusetts, 1944). The drawing in Figure 24 is reproduced from a 1920
Armour & Co. sales catalogue made available by Harmon Wray of Memphis,
Tennessee. The lamps in Figure 27 are drawn from catalogue illustrations
in _Edwardian shopping: a selection from the Army and Navy Stores
catalogues, 1898-1913_ (compiled by R. H. Langbridge, David and Charles,
Newton Abbot, 1975) and _Victorian shopping: a facsimile of the Harrod’s
Stores 1895 issue of the_ _price list_ (David and Charles, Newton Abbot,
1972).
The engravings on pages 12, 24, and 39 are reproduced from Jim Harter’s
_Food and drink, a pictorial archive from nineteenth-century sources_
(Dover, New York, 1980). That on page 29 is from the 1895 _Encyclopedia
Britannica_ (volume 10, page 658, The Werner Company, Chicago). The lamp
on page 49 is from the 1902 edition of the Sears Roebuck catalogue
(Crown, New York, 1969).
A BRIEF HISTORY OF MIDDLETON PLACE
[Illustration: Middleton Place]
The land that now comprises Middleton Place lies in one of the earliest
areas inhabited by Englishmen in South Carolina. In 1674, just four
years after the first colonists settled at Charles Town, Lord Proprietor
Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper granted lands for settlement along the lower
reaches of the Ashley River. Among these was the site of Middleton
Place, deeded in 1675 to Jacob Waight. Waight apparently forfeited his
claim to the tract, and in 1700, it was granted to Richard Godfrey, who
sold it in 1729 to John Williams, a wealthy landowner and justice of the
peace. The land passed into Middleton hands in 1741, when John Williams’
daughter Mary married Henry Middleton, the second son of former
provincial governor Arthur Middleton.
Henry and his two brothers were the third generation of Middletons in
South Carolina. Their grandfather, Edward Middleton, had arrived in the
colony in 1678 as part of the great influx of Barbadian Englishmen who
made up more than half of Charles Town’s early immigrants. Like many
other Barbadians, Edward settled along Goose Creek, north of Charleston.
His plantations there, along with estates in Barbados and England,
passed to his son Arthur in 1685. Arthur also inherited a prominent
position in Carolina society, and with it, an active role in the
political life of the colony. Edward had served as Lords Proprietors’
deputy and assistant justice in his few years’ stay in Goose Creek, but
Arthur, who held more than a dozen public offices, was the Middleton who
established the tradition of political leadership that was to
distinguish his family for four generations.
Probably the most significant of Arthur’s achievements was his role in
the overthrow of the Lords Proprietor. The eight British noblemen
theoretically owned and managed all of the Carolinas, but in later
years, they adopted policies that their colonists saw as inimical to
survival in the American wilds. Following the Lords Proprietors’ failure
to provide military aid during the bloody Yamasee Indian uprising of
1715-1717, Arthur Middleton led a convention that in 1719 persuaded the
king to remove the Lords Proprietor. Later, as president of the Ruling
Council, he served as governor of the province until the arrival of a
governor appointed by the king.
Arthur’s son Henry inherited a large share of his father’s estates in
Carolina and Barbados and was reputed to be one of the wealthiest men in
Carolina. According to one contemporary account, he owned some 20
plantations and 800 slaves. Nonetheless, after his marriage to Mary
Williams he moved his residence and base of operations to his wife’s
Ashley River plantation, which they named Middleton Place. The manor
house was already standing at that time, but Henry added the two flanker
buildings (the southernmost of which now serves as the main house), and
laid out the formal gardens, terraces, and ornamental lakes that made
Middleton Place one of the most elegant of the lowcountry plantations.
Rice, introduced into the Carolinas in the late seventeenth century, had
become by Henry’s time a staple crop of the Ashley River region and was
becoming the main product of Middleton Place (Fig. 1).
[Illustration: Figure 1. Locator map of Middleton Place, Dorchester
County, South Carolina.]
Like his father, Henry held a number of public offices under the royal
government, but it was in the rebellion against that government that he
gained political renown, first as president of the South Carolina
Provincial Congress and later as a delegate to the First Continental
Congress in Philadelphia. Only seven of Henry and Mary’s eleven children
lived to adulthood, but both surviving sons were members of the
Provincial Congress, and when Henry’s health began to fail in 1776 his
elder son Arthur replaced him as delegate to the Second Continental
Congress. At 34 Arthur Middleton was the senior South Carolina delegate
to sign the Declaration of Independence.
The American Revolution took a heavy toll on South Carolina. Several
major campaigns were fought in the former colony, and Charleston and the
surrounding lowcountry were occupied by the British from 1780 to 1782.
During this time, 63 leading Charlestonians, including Arthur Middleton,
were imprisoned in British St. Augustine. By 1780, Henry was seriously
ill, and, like other lowcountry residents, he and his sons suffered
serious financial losses from the plunder and disruption that
accompanied the British occupation.
Henry died in 1784 leaving Middleton Place and other plantations to
Arthur, who in the postwar economic climate soon regained his former
standard of living. Arthur and his family of nine children had lived at
Middleton Place for some time before Henry’s demise, and several
important economic changes took place under Arthur’s direction. In
Henry’s early years at Middleton Place, rice had been cultivated in
inland swamps irrigated with water from man-made reservoirs. By the late
eighteenth century, soil exhaustion had begun to pose a problem, and
many planters, including the Middletons, changed to tidal rice
cultivation that involved impounding freshwater swamps along the rivers’
edges and allowing them to be flooded by the natural action of the river
tides. Not only did the new soil and nutrients deposited by the
floodwaters remove the threat of soil exhaustion, but the tidal system
was more labor-efficient than inland cultivation, resulting in higher
yield per acre. This new efficiency was compounded by another late
eighteenth century innovation, the water-powered rice mill, installed at
Middleton Place about the same time.
Arthur’s eldest son Henry inherited Middleton Place at the age of 17,
apparently while he was still in school in England. Henry devoted a
great deal of attention to the gardens planted by his grandfather,
enlarging them and introducing many new plants, some of them newly
brought to America by the French botanist André Michaux. From 1801 to
1830 Henry was continuously in public office, first as a South Carolina
legislator and governor, then as a member of the United States Congress,
and from 1820 to 1830 as American ambassador to Russia.
By the time he returned from his service abroad, South Carolinians had
embarked upon the separatist agitation that would eventually lead to
their third attempt in 150 years to overthrow a government.
At issue were the 1828 and 1832 “tariffs of abomination,” designed by
Congress to protect fledgling industries in the northern states.
However, they were viewed by indignant Carolina planters, dependent on
direct trade with England, as an assault on their agricultural economy.
The South Carolina Nullification Convention of 1832 declared the tariff
null and void on the basis of John C. Calhoun’s doctrine that a state
had a right to vote to disregard onerous acts of Congress and, if other
states found its action unacceptable, to secede. As a member of the
opposing Union Party, Henry Middleton was perhaps the first of his
family to take an active conservative role in a dispute pitting South
Carolina against an outside governing body.
This early threat to the Union was deflected with a tariff reduction in
1833, but the nullification doctrine had laid the ideological groundwork
on which 11 southern states were to base their secession over the issue
of slavery 28 years later. Slavery was an economic mainstay of
agriculture throughout the South, but particularly so in South Carolina,
where slaves had been imported from Barbados with the very earliest
settlers at Charles Town and where a plantation system based on
involuntary servitude had existed since the late seventeenth century. By
the early 1700s African slaves already made up three-quarters of the
South Carolina population, and on the eve of the Civil War, South
Carolina remained the largest slaveholding state in the Union. Colleton
District, where Middleton Place was located, was nearly 80% black.
This enormous disparity meant that white slaveholders lived in constant
fear of slave insurrection. They were equally fearful of emancipation,
which, as abolitionist sentiment grew in the North, many planters came
to view as an inevitable outcome of northern political dominance. There
were slaveholders who staunchly opposed disunion, but South Carolina, as
it had been during the nullification dispute, was a hotbed of
secessionism. With the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln, a Charleston
convention passed an ordinance making South Carolina the first state to
withdraw from the Union. Henry Middleton had died in 1846 before the
slavery controversy reached its height, but among the signers of the
Ordinance of Secession were his sons John Izard Middleton of Georgetown,
and Williams Middleton of Middleton Place.
The war that followed caused more devastation to the plantation economy
than emancipation, for in defeat the planters lost most of their
financial assets and their voice in local government. In areas that had
witnessed military action, they often saw devastation of their homes and
property. Middleton Place, plundered and burned by invading troops in
1865, was no exception. Williams and his family fled to Charleston where
they lived while renting the plantation grounds to a “Yankee captain.”
In 1867 Williams borrowed money from a sister in Philadelphia and began
the task of restoring the burnt-out southern flanker building to serve
as a family residence. In 1871, before repairs were complete, the
Middletons and their two children were again living at Middleton Place
in the shadow of the ruined mansion that had housed five generations of
their family.
Restoration of the plantation’s agricultural operations, however, proved
more difficult. The tidal rice fields, which required constant
maintenance, had been neglected, and the loss of the more than 100
slaves who had worked the plantation grounds and rice fields left
Williams without the necessary labor for large-scale cultivation.
Although vastly diminished quantities of rice continued to be harvested
elsewhere in the lowcountry, Middleton Place apparently never again
produced a successful rice crop. By 1890 rice from Louisiana, where flat
upland fields permitted mechanized cultivation impossible in the South
Carolina marshes, had begun to drive Carolina rice off the market. Today
no rice at all is grown in South Carolina.
Two new commodities that gained importance in the land-poor lowcountry
economy were phosphates, of which postbellum South Carolina was the
nation’s leading supplier, and timber, an important product in the
Southeast. Williams turned his hand to exploitation of these natural
resources, and by 1878, Middleton Place boasted both phosphate mines and
a sawmill. Although he and his heirs continued to lease the plantation
timber and mineral rights until the early twentieth century, by 1880 the
aging Williams had left Middleton Place, taking up residence in
Greenville, South Carolina. After Williams died in 1882, his wife Susan
made regular visits to the plantation. But following her death in 1900,
Middleton Place lay abandoned, except for periodic visits, for over 20
years. Williams and Susan’s son Henry, who had left South Carolina in
the 1870s to attend Cambridge University, was living in England, and
their daughter Elizabeth had married and settled in Greenville.
The plantation was inherited by a cousin, J. J. Pringle Smith, who, in
1925, moved his family into the southern flanker house and began the
slow job of restoring the Middleton Place grounds and gardens. Pringle
Smith built the present stableyard complex on the site of older
outbuildings, installed an electrical generator in the former privy
building, and opened the gardens to the public. In 1970 Middleton Place
became a Registered National Historic Landmark under the management of
the Smiths’ grandson, Charles Duell. In 1975, with the creation of the
Middleton Place Foundation, the south flanker containing many of the
family’s original furnishings was also opened to the public.
ARCHEOLOGY AT MIDDLETON PLACE
[Illustration: uncaptioned]
Modern historical archeology, like archeology in general, is based on
two main premises. First, where man has lived for any length of time, he
has left behind artifacts—bits of food, broken pottery, tools, and
ornaments—that tell us something of his way of life. Second, human
behavior is, to a certain extent, patterned and predictable, and similar
artifacts will be found on similar sites. Thus, even if two household
sites are separated by hundreds of years of technological innovation,
they may yield utensils used for roughly the same purposes. If two
contemporary sites produce artifacts of the same style and workmanship,
then their inhabitants shared at least some aspects of a single culture,
and variations between the sites can provide valuable clues to
adaptations of that culture to different circumstances.
The distinction between prehistoric and historical archeology is based
not on differences in technology but on the presence or absence of
written records. While prehistoric archeologists reconstruct ancient
cultures primarily from artifactual evidence, historical archeology
employs both documents and material remains to study literate societies
and the pre-literate populations whom they influenced. In much of Europe
and Asia, the historic period begins centuries before Christ, but in
North America, historical archeology is concerned with the period of
recorded European exploration and occupation extending from the
sixteenth century to the present.
From these four centuries we have innumerable written records covering a
vast array of subjects. But although these records contain a wealth of
information, they cannot always be trusted to be either thorough or
accurate. In addition, historians are often most interested in aspects
of daily life—such as health, diet, and the living conditions of the
unlettered poor—that are frequently omitted altogether from written
records. By examining the record of activities that people have left in
the soil, archeology can provide written history with a comparatively
unbiased account of the economic conditions underlying historical
change.
Probably the most obvious indicators of past living conditions are
buildings, around which most human activities are centered. On most
historic sites these include not only residences but also a variety of
outbuildings such as privies, barns, and work buildings that are crucial
to understanding the site as a whole. This is especially true of such
complex institutions as plantations, where hundreds of people may have
lived and worked over an area of many acres. Since many of these
buildings have long since disappeared, the first task of the excavator
is to find them by tracing the concentrations of debris that,
fortunately for archeologists, our ancestors scattered freely around
their dwellings and workplaces.
The Middleton Place privy is a modest one-story building half hidden in
live oaks behind the Middleton House museum. It has outlasted many of
its more imposing contemporaries to become one of the oldest standing
structures at Middleton Place. Built in the late eighteenth or early
nineteenth century, the privy was one of the few plantation buildings to
escape destruction by Sherman’s troops in 1865. In its long lifetime it
has served as an outdoor latrine, a generator house, and a storage
building. Now, newly equipped with running water and flush toilets, it
is the only antebellum building at Middleton Place still serving the
purpose for which it was constructed.
An outdoor privy may seem an unlikely place to conduct an archeological
excavation. Much eighteenth and nineteenth century trash was simply
tossed out the back door, but the backyard privy, ready made for waste
disposal and usually handily located a few dozen feet from the house,
also received its share of household disposables. As a privy pit neared
abandonment, the top layers were often stuffed with broken objects
before it was sealed and a new hole dug.
The privy is set solidly atop a rectangular brick-lined pit, which house
servants kept open and functioning for more than 100 years with a system
of “honey buckets.” When the privy was finally abandoned in the 1920s,
the entire pit, not just the top few inches, was packed with broken or
unusable household goods.
The privy pit was sealed by J. J. Pringle Smith, who laid a concrete
floor in the privy building and converted it into a shed for the
plantation’s first electric generator. With the subsequent arrival of
outside electrical power, the generator too was abandoned, and the privy
stood undisturbed for the next 40 years. In 1978 workmen remodeling the
building into a modern restroom broke through the concrete floor to the
artifact-laden pit below. The artifacts were excavated and analyzed by
archeologists from the University of South Carolina’s Institute of
Archeology and Anthropology, and are now on display in the Middleton
Place Spring House Museum.
Privy pits, being relatively shallow, normally contain objects
accumulated and discarded within a very few years. The Middleton privy,
only three feet deep, was expected to be no exception. Once the
artifacts had been cleaned and restored, however, it became apparent
that this was no short-term kitchen deposit, but a diverse assemblage of
objects spanning more than 100 years of the plantation’s history.
A sealed archeological deposit can date no earlier than its most recent
artifact, and a handful of twentieth century utility bottles confirmed
that this chronological hodgepodge had been thrown into the privy pit
shortly after the arrival of the Pringle Smith family in 1925. The
scarcity of items from the Smiths’ period of residence, however,
suggested that the family had filled the privy not with their own trash
but with objects accumulated by the Middletons in the preceding century.
The artifacts could not have collected in the house before 1871, when
the Middletons moved back to their war-ravaged estate, or after 1900,
when Susan Middleton’s death ended the plantation’s role as a regular
residence. The artifacts left in the house spanned Susan and her
husband’s entire lifetimes, from the costly dinnerwares of the wealthy
planter to the plain stone china of his widow. As much as any exhibit at
Middleton Place, then, the artifacts on display in the Spring House
Museum bear testimony to the cycle of wealth and poverty, prosperity and
decay, that characterized the nineteenth century Middletons and their
plantation.
POTTERY AND PORCELAIN
[Illustration: uncaptioned]
The Industrial Revolution introduced an era of mass production,
technological efficiency, and mass consumption. One of its minor
miracles was the perfection of a hard-boiled white ceramic that was
within the financial reach of most of the population. Though hardly
striking to the modern eye, the white ironstone plates pictured below
(Fig. 2) are the result of years of experimentation by British and other
European potters. In durability, purity of color, and
cost-effectiveness, the everyday ironstones and granitewares of the late
nineteenth century represent a triumph of western ceramic technology
that has been little improved upon since the earlier part of that
century. (See Appendix 1 for a complete listing and illustrations of
ceramic manufacturers’ marks.)
The impetus for this technological marvel goes back to the global
expansionism of Europe’s seafaring nations in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Among the exotica brought back by early traders
was Chinese porcelain, an impermeable white ceramic ware unlike anything
produced in Europe. As trade with the Orient grew, so did importation of
Chinese porcelain. By the eighteenth century, Chinese potters were
regularly turning out blue-and-white “export porcelain” (Fig. 3) made
specifically for the European market. East India Company ships were
transporting it to England as “flooring” to protect perishable cargoes
of tea.
[Illustration: Figure 2. British-made white ironstone or granite
china, 1891-1900. All four plates are marked “MADE IN ENGLAND,” a
convention adopted in 1891 to comply with American import
regulations.]
Much of this porcelain found its way to the American colonies. In the
early colonial period, Chinese porcelain was a relatively rare and
prestigious ware associated with the upper-class custom of afternoon
tea. By the time of the American Revolution, both tea-drinking and
porcelain had spread to the lower classes. When American merchants
opened their own direct trade with China in the 1780s, they brought back
large quantities of porcelain along with the more lucrative teas and
silks. By the 1820s Chinese blue-and-white had become an ordinary
household fixture and, with a concomitant decline in quality of
production, began to lose favor with the American buyer. Very little was
imported after the early 1830s.
[Illustration: Figure 3. Chinese export porcelain. These fragments
are all from plates or serving dishes, probably imported before
1830. All are hand-painted with blue underglaze decoration. The
piece on the upper left retains traces of additional decoration,
including gilding, applied over the glaze.]
[Illustration: Figure 4. French Bourbon Sprig or Cornflower
porcelain, a pattern popular before the French Revolution. Other
pieces of this pattern are on display in the Middleton House dining
room.]
It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Oriental
porcelain on the European ceramic industry. Europeans greatly admired
the hardness, whiteness, and thinness of the Chinese imports, and many
of the most important developments in eighteenth and nineteenth century
ceramic manufacture resulted from a conscious effort to imitate these
qualities. Soft paste porcelain, made by adding glass to the clay body,
was an early attempt to reproduce the porcelain paste itself. The
Germans discovered the secret of true hard paste porcelain around 1710
and began producing it at Meissen three years later, followed by the
Austrians at Vienna in 1718 and the French at Sèvres in 1768. Early
European porcelains imitated the Oriental in design as well as paste,
but after about mid-century, chinoiseries gave way to flowers and other
European designs executed in a variety of colors. Through the end of the
century, European porcelain remained an art form available only to the
well-to-do. Figure 4 shows a French porcelain tea plate hand-painted in
the “Bourbon Sprig” or “Cornflower” pattern of scattered flowers popular
during the reign of Louis XVI. Probably produced in Paris in the
eighteenth or early nineteenth century, this plate was part of a large
set of Bourbon Sprig china originally brought from Europe by a member of
the Middleton family after 1820.
[Illustration: Figure 5. English porcelain platter, decorated over
the glaze with the polychrome orientalizing designs favored by early
19th century British ceramic painters. This dish was also probably
part of a large set, fragments of which have been found elsewhere on
the Middleton Place grounds.]
Little hard paste porcelain was produced in England, where bone china, a
somewhat softer porcelain with calcined ox bone added to the paste,
became a favorite material for expensive dinnerwares. Oriental influence
on British ceramics was more immediately felt in the British decorative
style, which through the nineteenth century continued to borrow heavily
from the Chinese and Japanese. Figure 5 illustrates an English porcelain
platter decorated in the colorful pseudo-Oriental motif typical of early
nineteenth century dinner services. These services, often made in stone
china or ironstone, sometimes included as many as two hundred pieces to
accommodate the lavish dinner parties that were the fashionable
entertainment of the day.
[Illustration: Figure 6. Creamware sauce tureen, manufactured by the
Josiah Wedgwood factory. One of the original 1780s Wedgwood designs,
tureens similar to this one are still produced by the Wedgwood
pottery in Barlaston, Staffordshire. Manufacturer’s markings
indicate that this piece was manufactured before 1860.]
A more significant effect of Oriental porcelain on British ceramics was
the revolution it inspired in the production of everyday earthenware.
From the early eighteenth century, British potters had sought to develop
a smooth white-bodied earthenware that could be made from local clays to
compete with the imported blue-and-white. The first real breakthrough in
this endeavor came in the 1760s, when Josiah Wedgwood, the giant of
British ceramic history, began production of a thinly potted pale yellow
pottery known as creamware or queensware (Fig. 6). Dozens of British
factories quickly took up manufacture of creamware, and it became a
staple dinnerware throughout Europe and America. It remained a popular
British and American tableware until the 1820s, after which it
degenerated into a common utilitarian crockery. Known as “C.C. ware,”
creamware finished out the nineteenth century as the cheapest of the
heavy utility wares, used chiefly for such items as mixing bowls and
chamber pots.
On the heels of creamware came pearlware, another Wedgwood invention
that consisted of a slightly whiter-bodied ceramic, which, with the
addition of a clear blue-tinted glaze, came close to approximating the
pearly bluish white of Oriental porcelain. The development of pearlware,
and the even whiter earthenwares that followed, ushered in the great
British period of blue transfer-printing that lasted from the 1780s
through the 1840s. The art of printing glazed ceramics with designs
transferred from engraved copper plates had been known since the 1750s,
but the more durable underglaze process was developed only in the
1770s—and then only in cobalt blue, the one color that consistently
remained unblurred through the high firing temperatures required for
glazing. Blue underglaze printing had been tried to no one’s
satisfaction on the yellow background of creamware, but pearlware, with
its faint bluish tint, was the first earthenware that was both hard
enough and of a suitable color for the new technique. Despite the
development of nearly pure white earthenwares in the early 1800s,
British potters continued throughout the nineteenth century to add the
blue-tinted pearlware glaze to earthenwares of many different
compositions.
Early transfer patterns imitated the Chinese and were engraved into the
copper plates in a series of deep lines, but a technique combining lines
and stippling, which allowed for greater detail and shading, was
introduced about 1810. With this and other developments, Oriental
designs gave way to pastoral and architectural scenes—English, Alpine,
Italianate, and American, among many others—usually surrounded by
borders of English flowers (Fig. 7). In later years, many of these
scenes were printed in various colors made possible by the introduction
of new dyes in the late 1820s, but blue remained the most popular color
through the end of the transfer-printing era in the late 1840s.
[Illustration: Figure 7. Light blue transfer-printed serving bowl,
manufactured by J. & G. Alcock, Staffordshire, 1839-1846. Pastoral
scenes like this TYROL pattern were popular from about 1810 through
the 1840s.]
[Illustration: Figure 8. Molded white ironstone chamber pot,
probably American made, c. 1860-1900.]
The dinnerware that pre-empted transfer-printed earthenware was plain
stone china of the sort pictured in Figure 2. Late nineteenth century
stone china, also known as ironstone, graniteware, and semi-porcelain,
was not a new ceramic but a variant of the stone chinas and ironstones
first produced by Josiah Spode and Charles Mason in the first two
decades of the century. The novelty of the stone chinas sold after 1840
lay in the new inexpensive methods of mass-producing them, and in their
hitherto unthinkable absence of painted decoration. Early nineteenth
century stone chinas had been elaborately decorated with Oriental
wildlife and transfer-printed patterns, but by mid-century it was almost
all stark white, with only embossed or molded decoration. After about
1870, it was often produced with no decoration at all.
Stone china at its best was nearly unbreakable, and thus admirably
suited to life in the still rough-and-ready American states. Like
earlier wares, most of the stone china sold in the United States was
imported from Great Britain. The fledgling American pottery industry did
not begin producing hard-paste whitewares until after 1860, and
throughout the nineteenth century American-made ironstone was considered
inferior to imported china. Much of the early American potter’s energy
went into the production of common utility items, which, like the
probably American-made chamberpot in Figure 8, were often unmarked to
hide their domestic origins.
At the opposite extreme of the decorative scale was English majolica, a
gaudily painted ware introduced by Minton & Co. at the 1851 “Great
Exhibition” in London (Fig. 9). Early Minton majolica was intended as an
imitation of sixteenth century Italian majolica and featured
hand-painted romantic scenes on an opaque white background. The style
quickly evolved, however, into a fancifully molded pottery decorated
with a wide range of colorful semitranslucent glazes. Produced by a
number of factories after about 1860, majolica was used through the end
of the century both for inexpensive domestic items and for sometimes
massive ornamental objects such as jardinieres.
[Illustration: Figure 9. English majolica, c. 1860-1910. This
brightly colored ware was often molded into shapes resembling trees
or other plants. The brown-glazed handle is from a pitcher
apparently colored with blue, yellow, and brown.]
Manufacture of European porcelain had not ceased during the years
British earthenware dominated the American ceramic market, but the
nature of the product had changed considerably. The French porcelain
industry, in particular, had evolved from a restricted craft patronized
by royalty to a number of independently owned factories turning out
standardized dinnerwares for the public taste. These relatively
inexpensive wares appealed to Americans as well as Europeans, and French
porcelains were imported in quantity beginning around 1850. To
Americans, the most prestigious French porcelain came from Limoges,
where a number of factories had clustered to take advantage of extensive
kaolin deposits. Of Limoges porcelain, the most highly regarded was that
produced by Haviland & Co., a firm founded in 1842 by an American china
merchant, David Haviland, to produce porcelain, specifically designed
for the American market (Fig. 10). Cheaper French porcelains, often with
no manufacturer’s mark, were sturdily and heavily made in an apparent
attempt to capture the white ironstone dinnerware market.
[Illustration: Figure 10. Limoges porcelain, c. 1875-1891. The
dinner plate at left bears the hallmark of Haviland & Co., an
American-run French Company that produced porcelain especially for
the American market. Three other undecorated plates, the least
expensive kind of porcelain, were also recovered in the privy
excavation.]
[Illustration: Figure 11. Decal-printed Austrian porcelain, probably
c. 1900-1918. Decal-printing, or decalcomania, was first used on
ceramics around the turn of the century and is a common method of
decorating china today.]
Despite its popularity, French porcelain did not succeed in replacing
white ironstone in the American cupboard. That remained for German and
Austrian porcelain (Fig. 11), an even cheaper ware that began to enter
the country in quantity around 1875, and in prodigious amounts after the
turn of the century. Much admired for their thinness and translucency,
these delicate dinnerwares easily undersold not only ironstone and the
established French and British porcelains, but the then fashionable
pressed glass tableware sets as well. Like most porcelains of the
period, Austrian and German dinner sets were usually decorated with
small sprays of naturalistic flowers. This design was made easier by the
late nineteenth century development of decal-printing, or
“decalcomania,” a process by which multicolored paper patterns are
transferred directly onto the surface of a glazed ceramic.
Decal-printing was first used on European ceramics around 1900, and it
remains a popular ceramic decoration today.
Most of the popular Austrian porcelains were manufactured near Carlsbad
in Bohemia, which after World War I became a part of modern
Czechoslovakia. After World War I Czechoslovakia and other European
countries continued to dominate the American porcelain market. Although
American-made earthenwares and stone chinas had become a competitive
force around the beginning of the century, it was not until World War
II, and the resulting disruption of the European china trade, that
American porcelain manufacturers were able to end the tradition of
imported ceramics that began with seventeenth century Chinese porcelain.
GLASS TABLEWARE
[Illustration: uncaptioned]
Decorative glass recovered in the privy excavation covered a range of
styles and manufacturing techniques spanning the entire nineteenth
century. Most of the glass tableware, however, particularly the heavy
cut glass, appears to have been manufactured in the antebellum period.
This indication that the Middletons continued to dine off their pre-war
finery until they left the plantation may be an indication of the
family’s reduced financial circumstances after the Civil War. Only a few
of the more representative glass tableware items are illustrated below.
[Illustration: Figure 12. Cut glass pitcher with applied crimped
handle. Early 19th century, possibly American-made.]
One of the more popular and long-lived methods of decorating glass has
been wheel-cutting, introduced into England from Germany by the early
eighteenth century, and used primarily on the soft but brilliant lead
glass crystal developed in England around 1675. Early nineteenth century
English cut glass, incised entirely by hand, tended toward restrained
neoclassical lines, but the introduction of a steam-powered cutting
wheel in 1810 ushered in an era of deep and extensive cut decoration.
Much of this English and Irish cut glass was imported into the United
States, but by the first few decades of the nineteenth century, American
glasshouses had developed a reputation in the field as well. The cut
glass pitcher in Figure 12 dates from this period and is similar to
pitchers produced in Pennsylvania glasshouses in the 1820s. The applied
hand-tooled handle is of a type seldom used after the 1860s.
[Illustration: Figure 13. Cut glass decanters. A. Cylindrical
flute-cut decanter, a style popular in the 1840s. The mate to this
decanter is still among the family possessions in the Middleton
Place house. B. Shouldered decanter with shallow fluting around
base. This style was introduced before 1830.]
[Illustration: Figure 14. Stemmed drinking glasses. A. Fluted ale or
champagne glass. Cut glass, c. 1810-1840. B. “Almond Thumbprint”
pattern wine glass. Pressed glass, post-1850. C. “Mascotte” pattern
wine glass. Pressed glass, post-1880.]
[Illustration: Figure 15. Ale flute and Mascotte wine glass as they
would have appeared unbroken.]
By the 1830s cutting in flat vertical slices, or flutes, had come into
fashion. Heavy straight-sided decanters like the one in Figure 13A were
well-suited to this decoration and remained popular through the 1840s,
after which the fashion swung toward lighter long-necked decanters with
rounded bodies. The decanter on the right with more restrained fluting
around the base only is probably part of a shouldered decanter of a
style most common before about 1830. Victorian glasscutters frequently
reproduced older styles, however, in the thousands of decanters that
were turned off the wheel before decanters ceased to be an everyday
tableware around World War I.
In the late 1820s American glassmakers introduced the side-lever glass
press, a device that could form wide-mouthed glass items by pressing
them against a mold with a plunger. The glass press allowed mass
production of decorated tableware at a much lower cost than cutting or
engraving, and within a few years pressed glass had begun to make
serious inroads into the cut glass market. Early American pressed glass
was made in stippled or “lacy” patterns formed by closely-spaced small
indentations in the mold, but in the late 1840s, smooth patterns similar
to some cut glass styles had been developed. The invention in 1864 of an
inexpensive substitute for the costly lead glass crystal further reduced
the cost of pressed glass manufacture, and by the 1870s, dozens of
factories were turning out pressed glass table sets in a staggering
array of patterns. These pattern glass sets remained the most popular
American glassware until the 1880s when cut glass resurfaced with deeply
and ornately incised “brilliant” cut glass.
Pressed glass manufacturers responded to the new patterns with pressed
glass imitations, a single example of which was recovered from the
Middleton Place privy deposit. Figures 14 and 15 show the transition of
styles through the nineteenth century. On the far left in both figures
is a tall ale or champagne glass wheel-cut with the vertical flutes
fashionable in the first half of the century. Figure 14B shows a small
wine glass pressed in the “Almond Thumbprint” pattern, an early non-lacy
pattern introduced in the 1850s or 1860s. The wine glass on the right is
pressed in the “Mascotte” pattern. This pattern, probably first produced
in the 1880s, was one of the many late nineteenth century pressed glass
patterns made to resemble the more fashionable brilliant cut glasswares.
GLASS MANUFACTURE IN THE UNITED STATES
[Illustration: uncaptioned]
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most bottles in the United
States and England were either free-blown—formed on the end of a
blowpipe without aid of a mold—or blown into a one-piece “dip mold” that
formed only the basic body shape. Neither of these processes allowed
large-scale production of oddly shaped or embossed containers, and since
even dip-molded bottles were formed by hand above the shoulder, the
bottles tended to be asymmetrical.
Hinged two-piece molds, capable of shaping the shoulder and neck as well
as the body of the bottle, had occasionally been used in England as
early as the 1750s, but they did not become common in the U. S. until
the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. A three-piece
mold with a dip body and hinged neck and shoulder parts, developed in
England shortly after the turn of the century, was popularized by an
1821 patent taken out by the Henry Ricketts Company of Bristol. These
two forms, especially the two-piece mold, remained the most common mold
types throughout the nineteenth century. On early two-piece molds, the
pieces were hinged in the center of the base, but a more stable mold
with a separate base part was developed by the late 1850s and was almost
universally used in the later decades of the century.
On almost all mouth-blown bottles, whether free-blown or blown in a
complex mold, the lip and upper neck were formed in a separate process
after the otherwise complete article had been removed from the blowpipe.
This process, the last step in the formation of the bottle, was known as
“finishing,” and the completed lip came to be called the “finish.” In
the early part of the nineteenth century, bottles were finished with
simple hand tools such as shears, but by 1840, a specialized “lipping
tool” with a central plug and one or more rotating external arms had
been introduced. This tool produced a smoother and more uniform finish,
and remained in use until the industry was fully automated in the
twentieth century.
While the finish was being formed, most bottles were held by an iron
pontil rod affixed to the base with molten glass. This process left a
rough scar on the bottom of the bottle where the pontil had been
detached. Holding devices which gripped the body of the bottle and
eliminated the need for empontilling were apparently known in England in
the 1820s, but did not become common in American glasshouses until the
1840s or 50s. By the 1870s use of the pontil rod had almost entirely
ceased.
The most significant American contribution to the early nineteenth
century glass industry was the development in the 1820s of the
hand-operated side-lever pressing machine. This device consisted of a
single- or multi-piece mold into which the glass was pressed by means of
a plunger. Since the plunging process required wide-mouthed molds,
pressing was used primarily for glass tableware, although straight-sided
jars were also pressed in the later part of the century.
In 1864 William Leighton of J. H. Hobbs, Brockunier, & Co. in West
Virginia perfected a formula for an inexpensive soda-based glass that
was as crystalline as the heavy lead glass previously used for most
American-made clear glass items. This new glass revolutionized the
pressed glass tableware industry, and probably was responsible for the
flood of clear glass medicinal and household bottles that followed the
Civil War. Like earlier clear glass, the improved lime glass was tinted
with manganese oxide to remove its natural green coloring. Clear glass
items manufactured with manganese tend to turn varying shades of
lavender when left exposed to the sun. Manganese was imported from
Germany in the nineteenth century to decolor glass and was no longer
used after the outbreak of World War I.
In the immediate post-Civil War period, the American glass industry
expanded rapidly. Molds were improved and worker and furnace
productivity increased to many times their 1800 level. New bottle shapes
were introduced, and specialized and embossed bottles proliferated. The
manufacture of preserve jars became a major industry, and a special
“blow-back” mold, included in John Mason’s 1858 fruit jar patent, was
used to form the screw threads for the sealable lids. Standard bottle
shapes for different products became common, as did uniformly applied
standard lip forms for different purposes. The standard shapes of the
bottles from the Middleton Place privy are shown in Figure 16.
Turnmolding, a long-known method of removing mold marks by rotating the
unfinished bottle in the mold, became a popular way of manufacturing
unblemished wine bottles. A popular technique of embossing was
plate-molding, an operation in which a personalized name plate could be
inserted into a standard mold for inexpensive lettering of even small
runs of bottles.
[Illustration: Figure 16. Bottle shapes from the Middleton Place
privy (not to scale). A. Champagne beer. B. Export beer. C. Malt
whiskey. D. Jo-Jo flask. E. Union Oval flask. F. Bordeaux wine. G.
Hock wine. H. Olive oil. I. American preserve. J. Fluted extract. K.
Bromo-Seltzer. L. Poison. M. French square. N. Baltimore oval. O.
Philadelphia oval. P. Double Philadelphia oval. Q. Plain oval. R.
Panel. S. Ball neck panel. T. Oil panel. U. Round prescription. V.
Quinine. W. Morphine. X. Free-blown apothecary’s vial. Y. Round
patch box. Z. Ointment. AA. Stoneware ink. BB. Bell mucilage. CC.
Cone ink. DD. Cylinder ink.]
The first mechanized production of bottles in the United States was on a
semiautomatic “press-and-blow” machine patented by Philip Argobast in
1881 and used by the Enterprise Glass Co. of Pittsburgh to make Vaseline
jars in 1893. Although the molten glass still had to be gathered and
dropped into the mold by hand, the Argobast machine could produce
completely machine-molded wide-mouth jars by pressing the lip and
blowing the body in two separate operations. Semiautomatic production
rapidly took over the fruit jar industry, and by the turn of the century
most fruit jars were made on semiautomatic machines rather than in the
traditional blow-back molds. Narrow-necked bottles, however, could not
be manufactured on “press-and-blow” machines because the plunger for the
pressing operation could not be withdrawn through a narrow opening.
Although a “blow-and-blow” machine for narrow-necked bottles was
developed in England in the late 1880s, semiautomatics for small-mouthed
ware were apparently not introduced in the U.S. until after the
development of the automatic Owens bottle machine in 1903.
The Owens machine, invented by Michael J. Owens of the Toledo Glass Co.,
was put into production in 1904. It differed from the semiautomatics in
that the glass was gathered into the molds by mechanical suction
process, thus completely eliminating hand labor. Despite a series of
improvements from 1904 to 1911, the Owens machine was slow to gain
acceptance, both because of its expense and because of the restrictive
licensing policies adopted by the Toledo Glass Co. In 1905 most bottle
production other than wide-necked jars was still by hand. Semiautomatics
came into increasing use, however, and a number of improvements made
them a serious threat to the Owens machine. After about 1914, there was
a proliferation of patents for automatic feeding devices that could
cheaply convert the more modern semiautomatics into fully automatic
machines. Use of feeder-fed semiautomatics, as well as the Owens
automatic machines, reduced hand bottle production to 50% of the
country’s output by 1917, and to less than 10% by 1925. More efficient
feeder machines slowly replaced the Owens-type suction machines and are
the type in general use today.
MEDICINE BOTTLES
As glass manufacturing expanded after the Civil War, so did the
pharmaceutical industry. Pharmacology became a more exact science than
it ever had been, and its practitioners dispensed their compound
medicines in glass bottles that for the first time were available in
precisely graduated sizes and a variety of shapes often tailored to suit
specific products. Early post-war bottles were usually made in the
aquamarine of “green” glass that had become traditional for
apothecaries’ wares, but use of clear lime glass spread until by the end
of the century most pharmacy bottles, like most of those from the
Middleton Place privy, were made of clear glass.
[Illustration: Figure 17. Pharmacy bottles. A. French square shape,
c. 1860s-1920s. B. Ball neck panel, c. 1860s-1920s. C. Philadelphia
oval shape, c. 1867-1903. Embossed C. F. PANKNIN APOTHECARY
CHARLESTON, S. C. D. Blue Whitall Tatum poison bottle, c. 1872-1920.
E. Wide-mouthed prescription bottle, possibly for morphine, c.
1860s-1920s.]
One of the first of the new shapes was the “French square,” a tall
bottle with beveled corners introduced in the early 1860s (Fig. 17). The
French square was followed by more elaborate rectangular, round, and
oval shapes, many of them adapted with one or more flat sides to
accommodate the paper labels or plate-molded lettering with which
pharmacists usually marked their wares. The “Philadelphia oval” shown in
Figure 17C, plate-molded with the name of an 1867-1902 Charleston
pharmacy, was a favorite shape.
Despite such advances as Louis Pasteur’s bacteriological discoveries,
ideas of medical treatment in the nineteenth century remained primitive
by modern standards. Without many of the vaccines and antibiotics now
available, people dosed themselves with a wide range of substances which
most twentieth century invalids would hold in dim regard. For instance,
pharmacists distributed morphine in small bottles such as that shown in
Figure 17E. Vegetable extracts that would not now be in anybody’s
pharmacopoeia were often sold in panel bottles (Fig. 17B).
One of the few restrictions placed on the more dangerous medicaments was
packaging. In 1872 the American Medical Association, concerned over
accidental poisoning, issued a recommendation that potentially harmful
substances be bottled in distinctively colored containers that were also
recognizable by touch. One result of this directive was blue quilted
poison bottles (Fig. 17D). A specialty of Whitall, Tatum & Co., a major
manufacturer of pharmaceutical wares, these bottles were manufactured
until about 1920. Other companies continued to produce poison bottles
until the 1930s, when it was decided that the bright colors and fanciful
shapes were more an attraction than a deterrent to children exploring
the medicine cabinet.
[Illustration: Figure 18. Patent medicine bottles. A. Maltine
bottle, double Philadelphia shape. Embossed THE MALTINE MF’G CO.
CHEMISTS NEW YORK, a company name used from 1875 to 1898. B.
Bromo-Caffeine bottle, c. 1881-1920s. Embossed KEASBEY & MATTISON
CO. AMBLER, PA. C. Horsfords Acid Phosphate bottle, eight-sided.
Embossed RUMFORD CHEMICAL WORKS and on base, PATENTED MARCH 10,
1868, c. 1868-1890.]
A better-known but less savory branch of nineteenth century medicine was
the patent medicine industry, which exploded into notoriety with its
extravagant use of the new late nineteenth century advertising
techniques. While most patent remedies were alcohol- or narcotic-based
frauds, the term patent medicine meant simply any medicine sold without
a prescription and included a number of legitimate and effective
over-the-counter remedies. The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and
subsequent acts of Congress were intended to control dangerous
substances and put an end to spurious advertising claims, and resulted
in the alteration or removal from the market of many patent medicines.
Others, such as Bromo-Seltzer, survived the legislation and continued to
be sold for years.
Most patent medicines were in fact not patented, for that would have
meant revealing the formula to competitors and consumers alike.
Nevertheless, the nature of many of the more potent over-the-counter
remedies was not entirely unknown. Hostetter’s Bitters, for example, was
regulated by the South Carolina Dispensary along with whiskey and beer.
Only three patent medicine bottles were recovered from the Middleton
Place privy deposit, and all appear to have been rather tame digestive
remedies of the sort that might be sold today. The amber bottle on the
left (Fig. 18A) contained Maltine, probably a digestive and nutritional
supplement rather than a cure. The blue bottle (Fig. 18B), the same
shape that was later used for Bromo-Seltzer, probably contained
Bromo-Caffeine, an antacid and laxative whose main ingredient was
magnesia. Bromo-Caffeine was the principal product of the Keasbey &
Mattison Co., which operated in Philadelphia from 1873 to 1882, and in
Ambler, Pennsylvania, from 1882 to 1962. The blue-green bottle (Fig.
18E) contained Horsford’s Acid Phosphate of Lime, a phosphate-based
preparation sold by the Rumford Chemical Works of Providence, Rhode
Island, from 1868 until at least the turn of the century. On later
bottles, however, the company name reads from top to bottom rather than
from bottom to top.
The predecessor to these sturdy containers was a thin-walled cylindrical
bottle used by the apothecaries and pharmacists of the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries (Fig. 19). All free-blown or dip-molded,
these bottles were used as late as the 1850s, and because of the Civil
War, perhaps even later in some parts of the South. The two bottle bases
at right are turned up to show the blow-pipe pontil scar made by holding
the bottle with a blow-pipe while its neck and lip were formed. The long
neck on the right is probably not from a cylindrical bottle but from a
globular flask that was used in larger sizes for wine and other
beverages, and in smaller sizes for medicines and essences. The style of
its collar dates this bottle to after about 1820.
[Illustration: Figure 19. Apothecary’s vials, 18th or early 19th
century. The neck and base fragments are not all from the same
bottles.]
[Illustration: Base fragments.]
WINE AND SPIRITS BOTTLES
[Illustration: uncaptioned]
Perhaps the oldest use for glass bottles has been the storage and
transport of alcohol. Some of the oldest bottles from the Middleton
Place privy are wine and spirits bottles. Bottles made in the same dark
green glass as the three pictured below left were used by the earliest
colonists for various wines and spirits, and, although the bottle shapes
have varied over the centuries, the tradition continues in the green
wine bottles of the present day.
With the improvement of glassmaking techniques in the nineteenth
century, alcohol bottles became more diverse and specialized. Although a
simple cylindrical bottle (Fig. 20B) remained a standard for various
types of spirits, flasks, like those later used by the South Carolina
Dispensary (Fig. 22B and C), became more and more common for whiskey.
Beer bottles developed a distinctive shape (Fig. 21), and different
shapes evolved for different types of wines. Figure 20A is a Bordeaux
wine bottle, used since the early nineteenth century for the sauternes
and clarets of the French Bordeaux district. The amber miniature shown
in Figure 20D is a two-ounce sample bottle of the shape normally used
for German Rhine wines. By the beginning of the twentieth century, most
types of alcohol bottles could be purchased in miniature sizes for use
in advertising and promotion.
[Illustration: Figure 20. Wine and spirits bottles. A. Turn-molded,
probably c. 1870s. B. Three-piece mold, c. 1850-1880. C. Three-piece
mold, sand pontil, c. 1820-1880. D. Rhine wine sample bottle, c.
1870s-1920s.]
BEER BOTTLES
The three late nineteenth century bottles shown below represent one of
the oldest pastimes in America. Until the late nineteenth century,
however, most American beers were locally produced ales, stouts, and
porters that were not bottled but sold in kegs to taverns. Modern lager
beer was first introduced by German immigrants in the 1840s, but it was
not until the 1870s that the expanding railway system, together with the
food preservation techniques developed by Louis Pasteur in 1870, made it
feasible to brew and bottle lager beer for a nationwide market.
[Illustration: Figure 21. Beer bottles. A. Pint champagne beer,
Lightning stopper, c. 1892-1895. Embossed in plate mold THE PALMETTO
BREWING CO. CHARLESTON S. C.; on back THIS BOTTLE NOT TO BE SOLD. B
and C. Export beer bottles, a type used after the 1870s. The tooled
crown finish dates bottle B between about 1892 and 1925.]
Lager beer was less alcoholic but more effervescent than earlier beers.
Increased bottling of lager and carbonated soft drinks spurred the
search for new bottle seals capable of withstanding more pressure than
the traditional cork, which was subject to leakage and had to be tied
down to prevent its popping out altogether. Two of the most successful
of the dozens of stoppers patented in the decades following 1870 were
Henry Putnam’s levered 1882 Lightning stopper (Fig. 21A), and William
Painter’s 1892 crown cap (Fig. 21B), the closure still used on most beer
bottles.
With these and other developments, production of bottled “export” lager
increased rapidly through the 1880s and 1890s. Keeping pace with the
growth of the beer industry, however, was the group that was to prove
its undoing: the American temperance movement. The temperance movement
became an organized lobbying force with the 1893 founding of the
Anti-Saloon League, and thereafter exerted increasing pressure on
Congress and the state legislatures. “Dry” agitation in South Carolina
led to the implementation from 1893 to 1907 of a statewide dispensary
system to control distribution of beer, wine, and spirits; by 1916,
South Carolina and 22 other states had prohibited all sale of
non-medicinal alcohol. National wartime legislation banned the
manufacture of distilled spirits in 1917 and beer and wine in 1918. The
Volstead Act of 1919 extended this ban until the eighteenth amendment
forbidding the production or sale of any beverage with more than .5%
alcohol could take effect in January 1920.
Prohibition completely changed the face of the American brewing industry
and almost completely destroyed the tradition of the small local brewer.
Many brewers tried to survive by selling soft drinks and “near beer,” a
lager with less than .5% alcohol. “Near beer,” however, could not stand
up to the competition of home brewers and bootleggers, and most
breweries either turned to the manufacture of other products or closed
down altogether. Two months after the sale of wine and beer was again
permitted in April, 1933, only 31 breweries had reopened. In 1940, seven
years after the lifting of all national restrictions on alcohol, beer
production finally reached its pre-Prohibition level, but the number of
breweries in operation was less than half the number in 1910.
SOUTH CAROLINA DISPENSARY BOTTLES
The South Carolina Dispensary system, in operation from 1893 to 1907,
was a nearly unique and completely unsuccessful attempt to control
alcohol abuse by placing a state’s entire retail liquor trade into the
hands of its government. Touted by its sponsor, Governor “Pitchfork Ben”
Tillman, as a means of encouraging temperance, guaranteeing purity of
product, and returning alcohol revenues to the citizens, the dispensary
was born as an eleventh hour compromise between pro- and
anti-Prohibition forces in the state legislature. The measure as enacted
satisfied neither side, and the dispensary remained a volatile issue in
state politics until its repeal 14 years later.
The system functioned by buying up wholesale spirits from local and
out-of-state manufacturers, repackaging or relabeling them at a Columbia
distribution center, and retailing them to the public through locally
operated dispensaries. Beer, which was never bottled by the dispensary,
was sold privately under special license, and alcohol of any sort could
be brought into the state for individual consumption. In the beginning,
all liquors were sold in special dispensary bottles, but by the turn of
the century, the dispensary was handling hundreds of products, many of
them pre-packaged national brands.
Litigation and often violent public resistance (an 1894 “whiskey
rebellion” left three dead) plagued the system in its early years. By
1905 the internal corruption had become so pervasive that a legislative
investigating committee recommended closing the system as unmanageable.
Despite the now-handsome profit that it was returning to the state
treasury, the South Carolina dispensary was abolished by the
Carey-Cothran Act of the state legislature in 1907.
South Carolina Dispensary bottles came in three basic shapes: Union
flasks, Jo-Jo flasks, and cylindrical bottles and jugs. Bottles made
before 1899 were embossed with palmetto trees (Fig. 22A and C), and
those made after 1899, when public disapproval forced the removal of the
state symbol from liquor bottles, were embossed with an intertwined SCD
monogram. Bottles were manufactured for the dispensary by over 20
different glass factories, but after 1902 all but one brief contract
went to the Carolina Glass Company of Columbia.
[Illustration: Figure 22. South Carolina Dispensary bottles. A.
Cylindrical palmetto bottle, 1893-1899. B. Monogrammed Jo-Jo flask
with embossed CFLG Co basemark, 1899-1902. C. Palmetto Jo-Jo flask,
1893-1899.]
FOOD CONTAINERS
Although olive oil, pickles, and other foods that do not require
sterilization have been packed in glass and ceramic containers for
centuries, the preserving of hot foods in airtight glass or metal
containers is a comparatively recent development. Housewives in the
eighteenth century knew how to preserve fruits by boiling them in glass
jars that were subsequently corked and sealed with wax, glue, or pitch,
but the idea of canning as we know it was popularized by Nicholas
Appert, a French confectioner who in 1809 won a prize from Napoleon for
his method of keeping food fresh for soldiers in the field. Appert
succeeded in preserving over 50 kinds of food, including meats and
vegetables, and published an essay detailing his method of boiling food
in a wide-mouthed jar and sealing it with a firmly driven cork. The
process was quickly copied in England and America, where seafood, fruit,
and pickles were first packed for wholesale in New York and Boston about
1820.
A major problem with Appert’s method of preserving in glass was the
irregular finish of hand-made bottles, which often prevented the cork
stopper from forming an absolutely airtight seal. For commercial
packers, an early and lasting solution was the tin-plated canister,
patented in England in 1810 and in the United States in 1825. An
inexpensive and effective closure for glass containers had to await John
Mason’s 1858 patent of the threaded jar seal, which consisted of a
molded screw thread that allowed the cap to seal on the shoulder rather
than the uneven lip of the jar. Home canners still use a similar
screw-top jar today.
Many Americans, both civilian and military, had their first taste of
commercially canned foods during the Civil War. Increasing varieties of
meats and vegetables were packed in tin cans in the late nineteenth
century, but glass bottles remained—and still remain—chiefly the package
of condiments, sauces, and other foods that require a reclosable cap.
These limited uses can nonetheless result in a large number of empty
containers. Food bottles are usually one of the most numerous items
found in a household trash heap. At Middleton Place, only four of a
total of seventy-seven bottles were food containers, and all had
originally held the preserves, flavorings, and oils that are usually
packaged in glass. Figure 23A shows a “One-pound American preserve,” a
jar sold at the turn of the century by at least one glass company, and
Figure 23B is a typical late nineteenth/early twentieth century olive
oil bottle. Figure 24 shows both the excavated example and a 1920
catalogue illustration of a white pressed glass container for Armour’s
Beef Extract, a by-product of the packing business produced by Armour &
Co. beginning in 1885.
[Illustration: Figure 23. Preserve jar and olive oil bottle, c.
1860s-1920s.]
[Illustration: Figure 24. Armour Beef Extract jar, c. 1900-1920s.
Armour & Co. began producing beef extract in 1885, but this glass
container was not used until around the turn of the century.]
None Genuine without
4 OZ. NET WEIGHT
Armour’s
Extract ^of Beef
MANUFACTURED & PACKED BY
ARMOUR & CO,
Chicago. U.S.A.
BOTTLES MADE AFTER 1900
This final group of bottles and jars have nothing in common except their
date. The two clear glass bottles at left are standard desktop ink
bottles made after the 1904 introduction of the Owens bottle machine and
before screw top inks replaced the corked variety around 1930 (Fig. 25).
The conical ink in the center was one of the earliest shapes for
desk-top ink bottles, introduced when ink was first bottled in small
individual containers in the 1840s. The contents of the ointment jar at
right, made after 1916, are unknown. Patent records indicate that the
May 15, 1916, date was neither a trademark registration nor a patent
issue. It may be a false patent date, put on the bottle to lend the
contents an air of legitimacy.
Although other artifacts, such as the Austrian porcelain in Figure 11
and the beef extract jar in Figure 24, may have been manufactured in the
twentieth century, these three containers were the only items in the
privy pit that were definitely made after Susan Middleton’s 1900
abandonment of the plantation. As such, they were the only evidence
archeologists had that these nineteenth century objects were probably
deposited in the twentieth century. All three are items likely to have
been in use at the time of the Smith family’s 1925 move to Middleton
Place, and they were probably discarded at that time.
[Illustration: Figure 25. Twentieth century bottles. A. Cylinder ink
bottle, machine-made, c. 1904-1930. B. Cone ink, machine-made, c.
1904-1930. Embossed on base, CARTER’s MADE IN USA. Carter’s Ink
Company began bottling ink in Massachusetts in 1858. C. Screw top
ointment pot, white pressed glass. Embossed on base, AUBREY SISTERS
MAY 15, 1916.]
LAMP GLASS
[Illustration: uncaptioned]
In 1859, drillers in Pennsylvania brought in the nation’s first
producing oil well, an event that was to alter radically the lives of
generations of Americans. The first revolution achieved by this
versatile new fuel was not in mechanical power, but in lighting. A
working oil field made possible the manufacture of kerosene, a promising
coal and petroleum-based illuminant that had been patented in New York
in 1854 but had not been put into production because of the scarcity of
one of its principal ingredients. Kerosene burned more brightly,
steadily, and efficiently than almost any known fuel except gas, which
suffered from the twin disadvantages of requiring immovable fixtures in
the wall or ceiling, and of being generally unavailable outside large
urban areas. The abundance of petroleum from the Pennsylvania fields
made kerosene one of the cheapest fuels available, and by the mid-1860s,
its use had far outstripped that of gas lighting. In many rural areas,
it remained the only practical form of household lighting until
electrification of these areas in the 1930s.
[Illustration: Figure 26. Student lamp chimney. This glass was used
in reading lamps like those illustrated in Figure 27. The
kerosene-fueled student lamp was an 1863 Prussian design that became
popular in the United States in the 1870s.]
Early kerosene lamps often resembled the oil lamps of the first half of
the century, and many were oil lamps converted to kerosene. Among the
new designs that became popular in the 1870s was the adjustable student
or reading lamp (Figs. 26 and 27), an 1863 Prussian invention used
through the early twentieth century. In the 1880s decorated lamp
chimneys came into fashion. One of the earliest, simplest, and most
enduring of these styles was the familiar “pearl top” chimney rim,
patented by the George A. Macbeth Company in 1883 (Fig. 28). Similar
crimped rims were produced by the Thomas Evans Company, which in 1899
merged with Macbeth to become, by virtue of a semiautomatic lamp chimney
machine, the nation’s largest glass chimney manufacturer. Demand for
glass lamp chimneys was curtailed by the spread of electric power in the
early twentieth century, and, although it continued in production, the
lamp chimney industry did not fully mechanize until after the 1920s.
[Illustration: Figure 27. Kerosene student and piano lamp,
reproduced from 1895 and 1907 department store catalogues.]
[Illustration: Figure 28. “Pearl top” and crimped lamp chimneys. The
true pearl top rim on the far left was patented by the George A.
Macbeth Co. in 1883. The variations shown on the right became
popular about the same time.]
LABORATORY GLASS
Figure 29 is a laboratory beaker of a type manufactured in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, probably a relic of William
and Susan Middleton’s inventor son Henry. It is free-blown in lead
glass, one of many glass compositions used for American laboratory
equipment before Corning Glass Works introduced low-expansion Pyrex
glass in 1915.
[Illustration: Figure 29. Free-blown laboratory beaker, probably
late 19th or early 20th century.]
Henry lived at Middleton Place with his parents until the 1870s, when he
went to study at Cambridge University under the Scottish physicist James
Clerk Maxwell. Henry lived in England until his death in 1932.
CONCLUSIONS
[Illustration: uncaptioned]
The artifacts from the Middleton Place privy present a unique
opportunity to observe one aspect of this plantation’s past. This
collection of ceramics, bottles, and other items constitute the refuse
discarded by the occupants of Middleton Place following the Civil War.
It reflects their needs and tastes and represents an unconscious record
of activities a century ago. Artifacts in the collection include items
from an earlier time as well as things purchased throughout the last
half of the nineteenth century.
These materials also reveal much about the privy’s history. When
compared with collections discarded around contemporary buildings, the
artifacts from Middleton Place are similar to those often associated
with abandoned buildings. The artifacts in the Middleton Place privy,
then, are likely to have been deposited there, not as the result of
day-to-day living, but as a consequence of cleaning out the rubbish of
the house’s earlier occupants. We may identify the privy artifacts as a
collection of items accumulated during a time of refurbishing as in the
1920s when J. J. Pringle Smith moved into the family residence and began
restoring it.
[Illustration: Figure 30. Many hours are spent in the laboratory
conserving and studying the artifacts.]
Although interesting and informative as individual objects, the privy
artifacts are much more informative as an “assemblage” resulting from
past activities. The archeologist must study assemblages, like pieces of
a puzzle, to reconstruct, interpret, and explain past events that
produced them. It is important to record carefully all the artifacts
found together as well as their relationships to one another and to the
deposit from which they were removed. Artifacts taken from the ground
without proper recording are removed from their archeological context,
and the information they hold is forever lost. Aimless “treasure”
digging has destroyed much of our historical heritage. The Middleton
Place privy collection illustrates how proper care, recording, and
analysis can reveal new information. With foresight and planning,
archeology can increase knowledge of the past for ourselves and for
future generations.
APPENDIX I
CERAMIC MANUFACTURERS’ MARKS
[Illustration: CERAMIC MANUFACTURERS’ MARKS]
A. Arthur J. Wilkinson, Royal Staffordshire Pottery, Burslem,
Staffordshire. White ironstone plate, 1891-1896.
B. John Edwards, Fenton, Staffordshire. White ironstone plate, c.
1891-1900.
C. John Maddock and Sons, Burslem, Staffordshire. White ironstone
plate, 1891-1896.
D. C. C. Thompson & Co., East Liverpool, Ohio. White ironstone nappy,
1884-1889.
E. Limoges, France. White porcelain saucer, c. 1875.
F. Haviland & Co., Limoges, France. White porcelain plate, c.
1876-1891.
G. Unidentified mark, decal-printed porcelain plate.
H. John and George Alcock, Cobridge, Staffordshire. Light blue,
transfer-printed bowl, 1839-1846.
I. Josiah Wedgwood, Burslem, Staffordshire. Impressed on creamware
sauce tureen, 1769 to present.
J. Unidentified impressed mark, white porcelain platter.
APPENDIX II
SIGNIFICANT DATES IN THE AMERICAN GLASS INDUSTRY
First three-piece hinged mold c. 1808
Two-piece hinged mold first used in America by 1809
First widespread use of slanting collar finish c. 1820
Ricketts patent for three-piece mold with lettered base 1821
First side-lever glass press late 1820s
“Lacy” pressed glass 1820s-1840s
Popularity of smooth-patterned pressed glass tableware c. 1840s-1880s
sets
Development of jawed lipping tool for bottles pre-1840
Amasa Stone receives first U.S. patent for lipping tool 1856
Introduction into U.S. of non-pontil holding devices late 1840s-1850s
for bottles
Formula for kerosene patented by Abraham Gesner 1854
Development of two-piece mold with separate post base pre-1858
Mason jar patent 1858
Blow-back mold in general use c. 1858-1900
First oil well in Pennsylvania leads to widespread use 1859
of kerosene fueled lamps
Introduction of French Square pharmacy bottles early 1860s
Student lamp patented in Prussia 1863
Leighton formula for improved lime glass 1864
Development of plate mold for embossed bottles pre-1867
Widespread embossing of bottles 1860s-1920s
Empontilling of bottles almost entirely replaced by 1870s
use of holding devices
Greatest popularity of turn-molded bottles 1870s-1920s
Student lamp introduced in U.S. 1870s
Louis Pasteur developed sterilization techniques for 1870
beer
Anheuser-Busch begins first commercial bottling of early 1870s
American beer
Heavily embossed and colored poison bottles 1872-1930s
Improved finishing processes result in smoother and by 1880
more uniformly applied bottle finishes
Argobast patent for semiautomatic press-and-blow 1881
machine for wide-mouthed jars
H. W. Putnam acquires patent rights for lightning 1882
stopper
Borosilicate glass developed in Germany 1883
Macbeth-Evans Co. patents “pearl top” lamp chimney 1883
William Painter patents crown cap 1892
Enterprise Glass Co. puts Argobast semiautomatic into 1893
commercial production
South Carolina dispensary system 1893-1907
Michael Owens patents semiautomatic turn-molding 1894
machine for light bulbs, tumblers, and lamp chimneys
First lamp chimney and tumbler production on Owens 1898
turn-mold machine
Most wide-mouthed jars produced on semiautomatic by 1901
machines
Owens automatic bottle machine patented 1903
Owens machine put into commercial production: first 1904
narrow-necked machine-made bottles
First production of narrow-necked bottles on _c._ 1907
semiautomatic machines
Corning Glass Works develops Pyrex heat-resistant glass 1915
Use of manganese to decolor glass 1917
State prohibition law goes into effect in South 1916
Carolina
National beer and wine production halted under Wartime 1918-1920
Food Control Act and Volstead Act
National prohibition of alcohol under eighteenth 1920-1933
amendment and Volstead Act
Machine-made bottles comprise 90% of total United 1925
States production
APPENDIX III
MARKS LEFT BY DIFFERENT TECHNIQUES OF BOTTLE MANUFACTURE
Free-blown bottles usually date before the second half of the nineteenth
century and are characterized by an absence of mold lines of any sort.
Because no molds were used, these bottles are often asymmetrical.
Dip-molded bottles, or bottles molded for basic body shape below the
shoulder, are also generally pre-Civil War and can only tentatively be
distinguished from free-blown bottles by their symmetry below the
shoulder and a slight tapering from shoulder to base. Bottles blown in a
two-piece mold have mold lines extending up two opposite sides, usually
to just below the tooled lip. On early nineteenth century bottles of
this sort, the mold lines continue across the center of the base, but
after the 1850s, most two-piece molds had a separate base part, either a
cup bottom, in which the seam encircled the outer edge of the base, or a
post bottom, which left a circular seam on the bottom of the bottle.
Most bottles from the Middleton Place privy were blown in two-piece
molds with cup bottoms.
The three-piece mold leaves a single horizontal line around the shoulder
of the bottle, and vertical lines extending up either side of the
shoulder. The height of these lines can vary from partway up the
shoulder to nearly to the top of the neck. A turn-molded bottle has been
rotated in the mold to erase mold marks and will exhibit faint
horizontal scratches and striations on the body and neck.
Embossing, very popular after the Civil War, usually consists of the
name of a company or product printed in raised letters on the sides or
base of the bottle. Isolated numbers and letters on or just above the
base are usually, but not always, mold numbers used by the manufacturer
for identification. Embossed letters are sometimes carved into the body
of the mold, but for smaller runs a plate mold, with a removable
lettered plate on one or more sides, was used.
Mold lines on bottles finished with a specialized lipping tool are
usually obliterated by faint horizontal striations extending to about a
quarter inch below the lip. The two-piece blow-back mold, however,
leaves mold seams to the very edge of the lip, and a lip surface that
has been ground smooth rather than shaped with a lipping tool.
A pontil mark is a circular scar left on the base by the iron rod used
to hold the bottle for finishing the neck and lip. Although there are
many different methods of empontilling, only two types of marks were
found on bottles from the Middleton Place privy. One is a “sand pontil
mark,” a roughened grainy area covering most of the base, apparently the
result of dipping the glasscoated pontil iron in sand before attaching
it. The other is a “blow-pipe pontil mark,” which results from
empontilling a bottle with the same pipe that was used to blow it. A
blow-pipe mark is a distinct ring of glass the same size as the bottle
neck.
Pressed glass is formed with a plunger in a mold on one or more pieces.
Pressed glass items are comparatively thick-walled, have smooth molded
lips, usually with mold seams, and often are distinguished by a short,
straight shear mark, like an isolated mold line, on the inside base.
This mark is from the severing of the “gob” of glass before it is
dropped into the mold. Bottles that are made on either automatic or
semi-automatic machines will have mold lines encircling the top of the
lip, as well as on the sides and base.
APPENDIX IV
ARTIFACT CATALOGUE FROM THE MIDDLETON PLACE PRIVY EXCAVATION
_Artifacts_ _No. of _Minimum
Fragments_ No. of
Whole
Items_
Ceramics
Porcelain
Undecorated Haviland & Co. plate 9 1
Undecorated saucer, D & Co., Limoges 5 1
Undecorated saucer 6 1
Undecorated plates 17 2
Undecorated platter 13 2
Gold-banded cup 9 1
“Cornflower” pattern tea or bread plate 4 1
Decal-printed tea plate or saucer, hallmark Alice / 5 1
Austria
Decal-printed Austrian teacup 11 1
British meat dish, hand-painted oriental design 16 1
Chinese export porcelain serving dishes 4 4
Creamware
Banded Wedgwood sauce tureen 1 1
Undecorated baker 1 1
Whiteware
J & G Alcock “Tyrol” pattern transfer-printed bowl 5 1
Blue transfer-printed mug, rural English scene 6 1
Fragment of blue transfer-printed cup or bowl, 1 1
bucolic scene
Undecorated ironstone or graniteware nappy 5 1
Undecorated ironstone or graniteware plates 23 4
Undecorated ironstone or graniteware cup 1 1
Molded white ironstone chamber pot 4 1
English majolica pitcher handle 1 1
Glass Tableware
“Four Band” style pressed glass tumbler 1 1
Fluted pressed glass tumbler 2 1
“Thumbprint” style pressed glass tumbler 5 1
Engraved tumbler, floral design 1 1
Wheel-cut champagne flute glass 2 1
“Almond Thumbprint” pressed wine glass 1 1
“Mascotte” pattern pressed wine glass 1 1
Pressed glass lid 2 1
Cut glass pitcher 9 1
Fluted cut glass decanters 8 2
Free-blown bowls 75 2
Bottles and Jars
Food Containers
Armour & Co. beef extract jar, white milk glass 1 1
Olive oil bottles, aquamarine glass 2 2
American preserve jar, clear glass 4 1
Alcohol Bottles
Palmetto Brewing Co. champagne beer bottle, 1 1
aquamarine glass
Export beer bottles, amber glass 2 2
South Carolina Dispensary Jo-Jo flask, clear glass 4 1
South Carolina Dispensary Jo-Jo flask, aquamarine 3 1
glass
South Carolina Dispensary cylindrical whiskey 2 1
bottle, clear glass
Unembossed Union flasks, amber glass 15 2
Unembossed Union flask, aquamarine glass 1 1
Rhine Wine sample bottle, amber glass 1 1
Dark Green wine or spirits bottles 21 4
Medicine Bottles
Panknin Apothecary plate-molded prescription 3 3
bottles, French Square shape, clear glass
Panknin Apothecary plate-molded prescription 4 4
bottles. Philadelphia oval shape, clear glass
Unembossed French square prescription bottles, clear 20 14
glass
Narrow-mouthed round prescription bottles, clear 2 2
glass
Narrow-mouthed round prescription bottles, 3 3
aquamarine glass
Narrow-mouthed round prescription bottles, light 1 1
green glass
Wide-mouthed round prescription bottles, clear glass 3 3
Unembossed Baltimore oval prescription bottle, clear 1 1
glass
Unembossed Philadelphia oval prescription bottles, 2 2
clear glass
Unembossed taper neck oval prescription bottles, 2 2
clear glass
Neck fragment from round or oval prescription 1 1
bottle, clear glass
Paneled pharmacy bottles, clear glass 26 3
Paneled pharmacy bottle aquamarine glass 1 1
Free-blown apothecary vials, aquamarine glass 8 4
Maltine Mf’g Co. bottle, double Philadelphia oval 1 1
shape, amber glass
Keasbey & Mattison Bromo-Caffeine bottle, round, 1 1
cobalt blue
Rumford Chemical Works Horsford Acid Phosphate 1 1
bottle, octagonal, blue-green glass
Bullock & Crenshaw decagonal vial, clear lead glass 1 1
Unidentified embossed French square bottle, amber 5 1
glass
Whitall Tatum quilted poison bottle, cobalt blue 1 1
Ointment or Cosmetic Jars
White milk glass patch box with lid 2 1
Aubry Sisters white milk glass screw top ointment pot 1 1
Pharmaceutical Accessories
Corks 2 2
Clear glass Lubin stopper 1 1
Clear glass medicine dropper 2 1
Ink, Glue, and Polish Bottles
Clear glass conical ink bottles, machine-made, 1 1
Carter’s Ink Co.
Clear glass cylinder ink bottle, machine-made 1 1
Amber glass conical ink bottle, blow-molded 1 1
Bell mucilage bottle, aquamarine glass 2 1
British brown stoneware blacking or master ink bottle 1 1
Tappan’s Relucent gold and silver polish bottle 1 1
Ink bottle cork 1 1
Lamp Glass
Student lamp chimney 2 1
“Pearl top” and crimped lamp chimney 19 4
Laboratory Glass
Pontil-marked beaker 2 1
Metal
Pewter Spoon 1 1
Brass curtain rings 7 7
Pill box with lid 1 1
Square-cut spike 1 1
Machine-cut nails 4 4
Hand-wrought nails 3 3
Hazel hoe 1 1
Coins
Liberty head quarters 5 5
Liberty head nickel 1 1
Personal Items
French toothbrushes 2 2
Lady’s leather shoe heel 2 1
White clay pipestem 1 1
Other
Isinglass stove windows 3 3
Delft tile fragment 1 1
Terracotta drainpipe fragment 1 1
Window glass 1 1
Slate tile fragment 1 1
TOTAL 473 164
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
The information contained in this booklet is a partial synopsis of
archeological reports published by the Institute of Archeology and
Anthropology, University of South Carolina, as Numbers 148 and 174 of
the _Research Manuscript Series_. For a detailed treatment of the
history and archeology of Middleton Place, and a complete listing of
bibliographic sources, the reader is referred to _Middleton Place:
initial archeological investigations at an Ashley River rice plantation_
by Kenneth E. Lewis and Donald L. Hardesty (1979), and _The Middleton
Place privy: disposal behavior and the archeological record_ by Kenneth
E. Lewis and Helen W. Haskell (1981). General reference works on
historical archeology and artifacts are listed below.
Baron, Stanley
1962 _Brewed in America: a history of beer and ale in the United
States._ Little, Brown, & Co., Boston.
Cheves, Langdon
1900 Middleton of South Carolina. _South Carolina Historical and
Genealogical Magazine 1:(3)_: 228-262.
Collard, Elizabeth
1967 _Nineteenth century pottery and porcelain in Canada._
McGill University Press, Montreal.
Cox, Warren E.
1970 _The book of pottery and porcelain._ Crown Publishers, New
York.
Daniel, Dorothy
1971 _Cut and engraved glass, 1771-1905._ William Morrow & Co.,
New York.
Douglas, R. W. and S. Frank
1972 _A history of glassmaking._ G. T. Foulis & Co.,
Henley-on-Thames.
Godden, Geoffrey A.
1974 _British pottery: an illustrated guide._ Barrie & Jenkins,
London.
Huggins, Philip K.
1971 _The South Carolina dispensary._ Sandlapper Press,
Columbia.
Hughes, G. Bernard
1960 _English and Scottish earthenware 1660-1880._ Abbey Fine
Arts, London.
Lee, Ruth Webb
1960 _Early American pressed glass._ Northboro, Massachusetts.
Lehner, Lois
1980 _Complete book of American kitchen and dinner wares._
Wallace Homestead, Des Moines.
McKearin, George P. and Helen McKearin
1966 _American glass._ Crown Publishers, New York.
McKearin, Helen and Kenneth M. Wilson
1978 _American bottles and flasks and their ancestry._ Crown
Publishers, New York.
Munsey, Cecil
1970 _The illustrated guide to collecting bottles._ Hawthorn
Books, New York.
Noël Hume, Ivor
1969 _Historical archaeology._ Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
1970 _A guide to artifacts of colonial America._ Alfred A.
Knopf, New York.
Revi, Albert C.
1964 _American pressed glass and figure bottles._ Thomas Nelson
& Sons, New York.
Russell, Loris
1968 _A heritage of light._ University of Toronto Press,
Toronto.
Scoville, Warren C.
1948 _Revolution in glassmaking: entrepreneurship and
technological change in the American glass industry,
1880-1920._ Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
South, Stanley A.
1977. _Method and theory in historical archeology._ Academic
Press, New York.
Toulouse, Julian H.
1969a A primer on mold seams. _Western Collector_ 7(11):
526-535.
1969b A primer on mold seams. _Western Collector_ 7(12):
578-587.
Wetherbee, Jean
1980 _A look at white ironstone._ Wallace Homestead, Des Moines.
Wright, Louis B.
1976 _South Carolina, a bicentennial history._ W. W. Norton &
Co., New York.
Transcriber’s Notes
—Silently corrected a few typos.
—Retained publication information from the printed edition: this eBook
is public-domain in the country of publication.
—In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by
_underscores_.
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