necessity of obtaining a midday meal “upon the road,” in any chance
farm-house you may be within at high noon. The old hunter fights shy of
such repasts by carrying her lunch with her, but when a drive of several
days is taken this course is not very attractive or possible. She must
then succumb to fate, accept the hospitality which is invariably and
cordially offered to her, and eat, or, at least, try to eat. I think
June is the most trying month for such ventures. Spring vegetables are
unknown in the land of their supposed birth. Fruits and berries are not
ripe. You are given a mysterious repast, flavored throughout with sour
milk and smelling of sour milk, which reaches its highest and sourest
point in the bread. I always plead dyspepsia and cling to a milk diet,
thus eliciting much sympathy, and hygienic and medical advice. Doubtless
in late fall or in winter, country fare might be more endurable, but,
with keen and most vivid fancy, I cannot imagine going china hunting in
the country in the winter time. Even glorious sleighing or the promise
of vast treasure trove could not englamour it with an enticing charm.
Think of shivering over snow-blocked roads under leaden skies, through
dreary, wind-wailing, naked woods, struggling up icy, snow-swept, and
blast-beaten hills to that lonely hill-top home, a New England
farm-house! Hope would perish on the road. Think of entering that drear
abode; of sitting, while you unfolded your wishes and went through the
stereotyped china questions with the stereotyped china smile, with
bursting veins and flushed face, in a stuffy, torrid, unaired room, in
front of a red-hot, air-tight stove, for there are no glorious open wood
fires nowadays in the great chimneys of country houses in New England.
Think of going from that super-heated, stifling atmosphere to a frigid
pantry or icy best room to look at china! How the congealed plates would
clatter in your trembling stiffened fingers; how you would hurry through
the repelling ordeal; never, as in summer, climbing upon chairs to peer
on upper shelves, never exploring in old window-seats, never lingering
to examine separately and lovingly each plate in a great pile. Above
all, think of ransacking a farm-house garret, “in cobwebbed corners,
dusty and dim,” with the thermometer below zero—it is beyond my power of
fancy to fathom such a scene. A fellow china hunter tells me a tale of a
lonely drive and Arctic exploration, and of riding gayly home therefrom
in the winter twilight, warming the cockles of her heart with four
Baltimore & Ohio plates pressed closely to her side, with two Lafayette
pepper-boxes and half a dozen Lowestoft custard-cups packed snugly in
her muff, and with a Pennsylvania Hospital platter in the fur robe at
her feet. I never believed her; it could not be true. China does not
grow in winter, ’tis a fair summer flower, and must be gathered under
summer suns.
But to what out-of-the-way, simple, rustic scenes has our china hunting
led us through the long summer days, scenes to be painted by Miss
Wilkins or Mrs. Slosson. To country auctions—not the ill-ventilated,
Hebrew-jostled, bawling arenas of city life, but auctions in country
villages, on old farms, where the auctioneer, if the day be warm, stands
outside the house on a door taken from its hinges and laid across two
barrels on the green, or among the beds of flowering phlox and
marigolds; where the lots for sale, unnumbered, uncatalogued, and
unclassified are handed out, a heterogeneous company, to the presiding
seller through the open windows behind him; where every small parcel of
value is neatly tied up and labelled with the names of past owners—Aunt
Hepsy, Mrs. Catey Doten, Old Job Greening; where every queer-gowned and
queer-coated neighbor for miles around has driven over in every kind of
vehicle to look at, if not to buy, the scattering house treasures. At
these country auctions, china and ancient underclothes, or pewter
porringers with feather pillows, may form a single “lot,” and you must
buy all or none. If you purchase you pay your money at once to the
auctioneer, with much friendly change-making by hard-fisted old farmers
on either hand; the china is delivered to your eager hands, the
underclothes are thrown to you or at you by the auctioneer over the
heads of the audience; the hay-rakes, or churns, or quilting-frames, or
whatever addenda may have been tacked to your porcelain, are brought
around and piled in a little heap by the side of your chair, or if you
have “backed up” your country wagon, are placed therein. I once bought
six large bundles of neatly labelled pieces of woollen cloth, pieces of
all the old petticoats and breeches and greatcoats that had been worn in
that house for forty years, just to get one India china plate. A
rugmaking—or I should say, “mat-braiding”—dame at my left, seeing my
dismay at my unsought treasures and noting my love of china, offered to
give me a modern match-box for the tidy bundle of pieces, which kindly
exchange I gladly accepted as being less cumbersome, if not more
beautiful.
Surely the summer sunlight never flickered down on a more typical New
England scene than a country auction. Sad are the faces around, quiet
reigns; no one smiles, no one jests as the hoarse-voiced auctioneer
holds up, explains, and extols some very mirth-provoking “lots.” This
breaking up and disbanding of a home has no droll side to country minds.
The last country auction I attended was at an old house in Rutland. At
it were sold the effects of an ancient lady of ninety years, who had
just died. Her nephew, a lively lad of eighty, carried away by the
excitement of the sale, or by the sight of so much ready money,
recklessly handed out to the auctioneer, as he stood under the dusty
lilac bushes, a large number of articles of furniture and table-ware
which had been temporarily stored in the house by the old lady’s
housekeeper, an equally ancient matron. The unconscious theft was
discovered late in the afternoon, just as we were about to drive off,
and the old man, overcome with horror at his unwitting crime, or dread
of the results of its discovery, tearfully forced us to disgorge half a
dozen McDonough’s Victory plates and several mugs and pitchers which we
had eagerly purchased and gleefully packed away. He “comforted us with
apples,” however, pressing upon us a peck of red-streaked, spicy Sapsons
to console us for our evident disappointment—and our sorrow that we had
not sensibly and cannily departed at an earlier hour.
But do not fancy that every gathering of country wagons in country
door-yards, every row of patient horses hitched at barn doors and along
the fence, denotes an auction within the doors of the farm-house. Draw
no such rash conclusion, and make no hasty and unheralded entrance
within, else you may find yourself, with china smiles on your lips and
china inquiries on your tongue, an impetuous and mortified intruder at
the saddest of all sad scenes, a country funeral. I cannot resist
telling that, after one such impertinent intrusion on that solemn
function, we returned in a few hours, when on our way home, to apologize
and explain our infelicitous and uninvited entrance at so unfitting a
time. When we stated that we were hunting for old-fashioned china, a
gleam of comprehension entered the faces of the two elderly women who
sat rocking by the fireside in the lonely kitchen, and as a result a
china-closet was raided, and we bought a number of pieces of unusually
fine Canton and Lowestoft china. At the time of purchase, we innocently
fancied that we gained this treasure honestly from the new-made heirs,
but have since then had harassing suspicions that the china was sold to
us by temporary care-takers who remained to “redd the house,” while the
mourning relatives had driven to the country graveyard, and who thus
snatched from the jaws of death a most dishonest penny.
Nor can you be over-confident that all auctions held in the country are
true country auctions. The ways of “antique men” are past finding out. A
sale of the household furnishings of an old farm-house in the heart of
the White Mountains, attracted a vast number of summer travellers, and
brought forth purchase sums that bewildered the farm residents for miles
around. Ere the sun went down on the day of the sale, a thrifty dealer
who happened to be present had had a conference with the farm-wife, and
as a result it was announced that she had a reserve stock of furniture
and china in her garret, which would be sold the following week. Back to
town sped the dealer, packed up a vast collection of unsalable débris
which he chanced to have on hand, and an “assorted lot” of modern
willow-pattern ware, freshly imported Canton china, new copper-lustre
and painted tea-sets, with a sparse sprinkling of old pieces. He sent
the entire lot by rail to the New Hampshire town; conveyed it by dead of
night to the farm-house; placed the crockery in the cupboards, the
brand-new brass candlesticks on the mantels, and the flimsy new andirons
in the old fireplaces, arranged all the furniture in judicious shadow,
and had a successful auction of “rare old colonial furniture and family
china.”
A famous starting-point, or rather rallying-point, on a china hunt is
the district school. Driving along the quiet country road, you chance,
in some barren and unlovely spot, often at some lonely cross-roads, upon
a small unshaded, single-storied building, whose general ugliness and
the beaten earth of whose door-yard tell to you its purpose and
character without the proof of the high-pitched and precise chorus of
monotonous three-syllabled words that vibrates shrilly out through the
open window. Hitch your steed to a tree, a fence, by the roadside, and
enter one of the twin portals of the abode of learning, passing by the
low-hanging rows of ragged straw hats, gingham sun-bonnets, and chip
“Shakers,” over the “warping floor,” in front of the “battered seats,
with jack-knife’s carved initial.” “Teacher” is glad to see you, the
children are gladder still. She sends a grinning barefooted boy out to
draw a pail of fresh well-water. You are asked, as a distinguished
visitor, to address the scholars. If you are a man, and thus of course
an orator, you do so with fluent tongue. If you are a woman, and thus
tongue-tied in public, you can ask for “recess” to be given, and make
your address informally to each little freckled face. You are, of
course, anxious to refurnish a house like the one in which you lived
when you attended the village school in the days of your youth. Do the
children know of any old blue china plates with trees and houses on
them? Have their mothers or grandmothers any pitchers with pictures of
soldiers, or sailors, or ships? Of course the children know; they know
everything—far more than grown people. You soon have an exact ceramic
report from every house in town whose little sons and daughters are in
the school, and of the homes of all their neighbors too. You have
extracted an unbiassed account from a set of little ready-tongued and
keen-eyed spies, whose penetration is acute, and whose memory is active.
If you can draw you can quickly show the children with chalk and
blackboard the kind of china you wish, and can depart with a long list
of houses which will repay you to visit.
But why do I longer tell the story of the chase, or vainly try to give
advice and rules for china-finding? I can only “pay you my penny of
observation,” knowing well that “Gutta fortunæ præ dolio sapientiæ.” Nor
can I fitly paint the pleasures, nor tell the pains of the search, more
than I could mould and shape the treasures it has brought to my home.
Nor can I hope to fire in other veins the fever that burns in mine; I
must be content to say with Olivia, “’Tis a most _extracting_ frenzy of
mine own.”
II.
TRENCHER TREEN AND PEWTER BRIGHT
The history of the use of china as table-ware in America would be
incomplete and ill-comprehended, without some reference to the preceding
forms of table furnishings used by the earliest colonists, the dishes of
wood and pewter, which so long influenced the form and even the
decoration of their china successors. As in the “Life of Josiah
Wedgwood” we are given an account of the pottery and porcelain of all
times, so in my story of china in America I tell of the humble
predecessors that graced the frugal boards of our ancestors.
In a curious book, Newbery’s “Dives Pragmaticus,” written in 1563, a
catalogue of English cooking utensils and table-ware is thus given by a
chapman:
“I have basins, ewers of tin, pewter, and glass,
Great vessels of copper, fine latten, and brass,
Both pots, pans, and kettles such as never was.
I have platters, dishes, saucers, and candlesticks,
Chafers, lavers, towels, and fine tricks;
Posnets, frying pans, and fine pudding pricks;
Fine pans for milk, trim tubs for souse.”
These were practically the table and kitchen furnishings brought by the
Pilgrims to New England, and for similar furnishings they sent to old
England for many years.
The time when America was settled was the era when pewter ware had begun
to take the place of wooden ware for table use, just as the time of the
Revolutionary War marked the victory of porcelain over pewter. Governor
Bradford found the Indians using “wooden bowls, trays, and dishes,” and
“hand baskets made of crab shells wrought together.” Both colonists and
Indians used clam-shells for plates, and smaller shells set in split
sticks as spoons and ladles.
The Indians made in great quantities for their white neighbors, even in
the earliest days, bowls from the knots of maple-trees that went by the
name of “Indian bowls,” and were much sought after and used. One large
bowl taken from the wigwam of King Philip is now in the collection of
the Massachusetts Historical Society. The settlers also established
factories for dish-turning. One thrifty New England parson eked out his
scanty and ill-paid salary by making wooden bowls and plates for his
parishioners. Wooden “noggins,” low bowls with handles, are often
mentioned in early inventories, and Mary Ring, of Plymouth, thought in
1633 that a “wodden cupp” was quite valuable enough to leave “as a token
of friendship.”
In Vermont bowls and plates of poplar wood were used until Revolutionary
times, and fair white dishes did that clean hard wood make. Sometimes
the wooden plates used by the poor planters were only square blocks
slightly hollowed out by hand—whittled, without doubt. Wooden trenchers,
also made by hand, were used on the table by the colonists for more than
a century. I find them advertised for sale with pewter and china in the
_Connecticut Courant_ of May, 1775. These trenchers were either square
or oblong. From an oblong trencher two persons, relatives or intimate
friends, sometimes ate in common, just as they had done in old England.
Two children frequently ate from the same trencher, thus economizing
table furnishings. In earlier times man and wife ate from a single
trencher or plate. Walpole relates that the aged Duke and Duchess of
Hamilton, in the middle of the last century, sat upon a dais together at
the head of their table and ate from the same plate—a tender tribute to
unreturnable youth, a clinging regard for past customs, and a token of
present affection and unity in old age.
A story is told of a Connecticut planter, that having settled in a
quickly-growing town and having proved himself to be a pious God-fearing
man, his name was offered to his church for election or ordination as a
deacon. Objection was made to him, on the ground that he had shown undue
pride and luxury of living in allowing his children each to use and eat
from a single plate at the table, instead of doing as his neighbors
did—have two children eat from one trencher. He apologized for his
seemingly vain manner of living, and gave in excuse the fact that
previous to his settlement near New Haven he had been a dish-turner, so
it had not then been extravagant for the members of his family to have a
dish apiece; and having grown accustomed to that manner of “feeding,” he
found it more peaceable and comfortable; but he was willing to change
his ways if they considered it desirable and proper, as he did not wish
to put on more airs than his neighbors.
But wooden trenchers, even in the first half of the first New England
century, gave place to pewter, and the great number of pieces of pewter
table-ware still found in New England country homes would alone prove to
how recent a date pewter utensils were universally used. The number
would doubtless be much larger if it were not deemed by metal-workers
that new pewter is of much better substance if the metals composing it
are combined with a certain amount of old pewter. Hence old pewter
always has commanded a good price, and many fine old specimens have been
melted up to mould over again for the more modern uses for which pewter
is employed by printers and lapidaries.
The trade of pewterer was for two centuries a very respectable and
influential one. The Guild of Pewterers in London was a very large and
powerful body, and English pewterers, men of worth, came with other
tradesmen at once to the Colonies. Richard Graves was a pewterer of
Salem in 1639, and Henry Shrimpton, an influential merchant who died in
Boston in 1666, made large quantities of pewter ware for the
Massachusetts colonists. The pewterers rapidly increased in numbers in
America, until the War of Independence, when, of course, the increasing
importation of Oriental and English china and stone-ware, and the beauty
and interest of the new table-ware, destroyed forever the pewterer’s
trade. Advertisements of pewter table furnishings appear frequently,
however, in American newspapers until well into this century.
Nor was it different in England at the same date. Englishmen and
Englishwomen clung long to pewter. In a poem written in 1828 by J. Ward,
of Stoke-upon-Trent, upon the Potter’s Art, he says:
“The housewife, prim in days we know ourselves,
Display’d her polished pewter on her shelves;
Reserv’d to honour most the annual feast,
Where ev’ry kinsman proved a welcome guest.
No earthen plates or dishes then were known,
Save at the humble board as coarse as stone,
And there the trencher commonly was seen,
With its attendant ample platter treen.” (Wooden.)
It is a curious fact that in the inventory of the household possessions
of Thomas Wedgwood, the potter, made at Burslem in 1775, we find that he
had forty-four pewter plates worth seven pence half penny each, and
twenty-four pewter dishes worth two shillings each, though the inventory
of the goods at his factory at that time included two hundred and
ninety-five dozen table plates of best white ware.
At a very early date all well-to-do colonists had plenty of “latten
ware,” which was brass, as well as pewter. All kinds of household
utensils were made, however, of the latter metal; even “pewter bottles,
pints, and quarts,” were upon a list of goods to be sent from England to
the Massachusetts Colony in 1629. I have never seen an old pewter
bottle, even in a collection or museum, and they must soon have been
superseded by glass.
In the Boston _Evening Post_ of July 26, 1756, appeared this
advertisement: “London pewter dishes, plates, basons, porringers,
breakfast bowls, table spoons, pint and quart pots, cans, tankards,
butter cups, newest fashion teapots, table salts, sucking bottles,
plates & dish covers, cullenders, soop kettles, new fashion roased
plates, communion beakers and flagons, & measures.” A vast number of
names of other articles might be added from other lists of sales of
pewter at that time—“quart & pint jacks,” “bottle crains,” “ink pots,”
“ink chests,” “ink horns,” “ink standishes,” and “ink jugs.”
Pewter “cans for beer, cyder, and metheglin,” were in every household;
pewter mugs and pewter “dram-cups with funnels,” pewter “basons,”
cisterns, and ewers graced the “parlour,” which contained also the best
state bed, with its “harrateen” or “cheney” curtains. Pewter
candlesticks held the home-made, pale-green candles of tallow and spicy
bayberry wax. “Savealls,” too, were of pewter and iron. “Savealls” were
the little round frames with wire points which held up the last short
ends of dying candles for our frugal ancestors.
Salt-cellars and spoons were of pewter, while extremely elegant people
had spoons of alchymy, or occonny, alcaney, alcamy, occomy, ackamy, and
accamy, as I have seen it spelt, a metal composed of pan brass and
arsenicum. Forks were almost unknown, and fingers played an important
part in serving and eating at the table. A lady traveller, in 1704,
spoke with much scorn of Connecticut people, because they allowed their
negro slaves to sit and eat at the same table with themselves, saying
that “into the great dish goes the black hoof as freely as the white
hand.”
[Illustration:
“The porringers that in a row
Hung high and made a glittering show.”
]
Pewter porringers, or “pottingers,” of every size were much prized. One
family, in 1660, had seven porringers, while another housewife was proud
of owning nine, and one silver queen porringer. The smaller porringers
were called posnets, a word now obsolete. Posnet was derived from a
Welsh word, _posned_, a little round dish. In these posnets posset was
served, and they were also used as pap-bowls for infants. Posnets and
porringers, when not in use, were hung by their handles on the edge of
the dresser shelf. The porringers with flat pierced handles are of
English or American make, while the “fish-tail” handles are seldom found
in New England, being distinctly Dutch.
Plates and platters were much valued. Governor Bradford, of
Massachusetts, left to his heirs fourteen pewter dishes and thirteen
platters, three large plates and three small ones, one pewter
candlestick and one pewter bottle—a most luxurious and elaborate
household outfit. Governor Benedict Arnold, of Jamestown, R. I., and Mr.
Pyncheon, of Springfield, Mass., bequeathed their pewter plates and
dishes in the same list, and with as much minuteness of description, as
the silver tankards and bowls, and the humble pewter was as elaborately
lettered and marked with armorial devices as was the silver. Miles
Standish left to his heirs sixteen pewter dishes and twelve wooden
trenchers.
Pewter was not thought to be too base a metal to use for communion
services. In 1729, the First Church of Hanover, Mass., bought and used
for years a full communion service and christening basin of pewter; and
the bill of purchase and the old pieces are still preserved by the
church as relics. The pewter communion service of the Marblehead Church
is now in the rooms of the Essex Institute, and until this century
advertisements of “Pewter Communion Flagons” appeared in New England
newspapers.
These pewter dishes and plates were a source of great pride to every
colonial housekeeper, and much time and labor was devoted to polishing
them with “horsetails” (_equisetum_), or “scouring rush,” till they
shone like fine silver; and dingy pewter was fairly counted a disgrace.
The most accomplished gentleman in Virginia, of his time, gave it as a
positive rule, in 1728, that “pewter bright” was the sign of a good
housewife.
In some old country homes, either lack of money, the power of habit, or
the strong love of ancient articles and associations, caused the
preservation of the old pewter utensils, and they now form the cherished
ornaments of the kitchen and dining-room. In the lovely old town of
Shrewsbury, which stands so high on Massachusetts hills that the
railroad has never approached its lonely beauty, there stands on the
edge of the “Common” a house, in which everything that is good and old
has been preserved, and appears as when the house was built, in the year
1779.
The old fireplaces have cranes and iron “dogs,” are festooned with ears
of yellow seed-corn, and are surmounted by the old fire-arms, while by
the chimney sides are hung old-fashioned brooms of peeled birch. These
brooms are made of birch splints, carefully split and peeled, and tied
in place with hempen twine on the strong handle; and many a farmer’s
boy, years ago, earned his first spending-money by making them, for six
cents apiece, for the country stores. Old settles, chairs, and tables
stand on the white-scoured floors; and in the “living-room” is a piece
of furniture seldom seen in New England, though common enough in
Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey in olden times—a “slaw bank.” The
word is a corruption of _sloap bancke_, or sleeping bench, and the slaw
bank was the great-grandfather of our modern cabinet folding-bed. At one
end of the room are doors apparently belonging to cupboards, which, upon
being swung wide open, disclose the oblong frame of a bed with a network
of ropes to serve as springs. This bed-frame is fastened at one end to
the wall with heavy hinges, and was hooked up against the wall in the
day-time, and at night was lowered to a horizontal position and
supported on heavy wooden turned legs, which fitted into sockets in the
frame; and it was thus ready for use. This bed is still kept made up as
of old, with hand-spun linen sheets, hand-woven “flannel sheets,” a
“rising-sun” patchwork quilt, and blue and white woollen bedspread.
But in the dining-room and kitchen of this old Shrewsbury homestead are
the greatest treasures—corner cupboards and shallow dressers full of
pewter dishes, which greet their owner with “shining morning faces” at
breakfast, and reflect in a hundred silvery disks the goodly cheer on
his table at midday and night. Round plates and platters are there of
every size, up to the great round shield on which was placed of old the
enormous Thanksgiving turkey. All are round, for oval platters seem to
have been then unknown.
The deep bowls, in which vegetables were served, stand there in “nests”
of various sizes. Teapots, too, and cream-pitchers and sugar-bowls, or
sugar-boxes, but no pewter teacups. I believe the little handleless
teacups were among the earliest pieces of porcelain imported from China,
and were often used when the rest of the “tea equipage” was of pewter.
Pewter salt-cellars, mustard-pots, flip-mugs, and syrup-cups are
interspersed among the larger pieces on the dresser.
Some of these articles are marked with initials and dates, not engraved,
but stamped, as with a die, J. S. and B. K., 1769. Doubtless these were
wedding gifts, and I doubt not that a set of shining pewter plates and
platters was as graceful and welcome a gift to Betsey Sumner in 1769, as
is a set of Royal Worcester porcelain to her great-granddaughter Bessie,
in 1892.