Part 1

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

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).

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

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.