Object Spotlight: Disappearing Creamware
George Washington’s zeal for keeping up with the Joneses (or in his case the wealthy Fairfax family at the next estate over) is well-documented in the early invoices of goods he acquired from England. In 18th-century Virginia, there was no better way to prove your societal metal than having really nice dinnerware.
During the summer of 1769, Washington requested more than two hundred pieces of “ye most fash[ionabl]e kind of Queen’s Ware” from his London agent. Evidently satisfied by the cream-colored earthenware (also called queen’s china or creamware), he continued to purchase much more over the next thirty years. It graced the tables of his many headquarters during the Revolutionary War, was put to daily, informal use at the executive residences in New York and Philadelphia, and was used at Mount Vernon.
Then it disappeared.
Of the hundreds of pieces that Washington purchased, only two intact examples are known to exist today: a fruit basket and stand. (These are now in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.) What became of the rest of the creamware? This is a mystery that is particularly puzzling given the care with which Washington’s descendants preserved his other ceramics.
Before creamware, Washington had used pewter plates and salt-glazed stoneware dishes, which became worn out and were then discarded. But unlike its dinnerware predecessors, creamware has not been found to any substantial extent in the Washingtons’ and their slaves’ trash piles, or middens. Archaeologists have found only enough sherds to comprise 30 fragmentary vessels.
These specimens, which were excavated at sites near the Mansion and slave quarters, provide clues to what Washington’s original queen’s ware looked like. The most common pattern has a feather edge, suggesting that that may have been the pattern on the bulk of his plates and serving dishes. Additional fragments hint at a variety of forms and patterns that likely supplemented these: a beaded edge, a twisted rope handle, a double intertwined jug handle with delicate flower and leaf molded terminals and a basket-weave spout from a teapot or coffeepot.
Washington was such a champion of “Queen’s Ware,” developed only two years prior by English potter Josiah Wedgewood, that his 1769 order was the earliest documented use of the term in Virginia, and perhaps in any of the American colonies.
Today visitors can see Washington’s surviving creamware sherds on view in the archaeology exhibit at Mount Vernon’s greenhouse slave quarters. Representative period examples are also on display in the third floor closet in the Mansion.
Gift: Edith Cowles Poor, 2001 [M-4104AB, M-4106AB, M-4107AB, and 2001.010.010-033])
March 14th, 2011 at 11:21 am
Love the peek into the mysterious third floor! I recognize that oval window from the outside of the Mansion.