[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.