Part 2

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.