Part II: Pottery Evid< 



Ivor Noel Hume 



The Salt-Glazed Stoneware 



Attention was first drawn to the potential impor- 

 tance of the 18th-century pottery factory at Yorktown 

 in 1956 when an examination of the National Park 

 Service artifacts from the town revealed large quan- 

 tities of stoneware sagger fragments visually identical 

 to those previously retrieved from a site at Bankside 

 in London. 66 On the assumption that where kiln 

 "furniture" is found there also must be examples of 

 the product, a more careful search of the Yorktown 

 collections was made, yielding numerous fragments of 

 brown salt-glazed stoneware tankards and bottles 

 which, although at first sight appearing to be typical- 

 ly English, were found to have reacted slightly differ- 

 ently to the vagaries of firing than did the average 

 examples found in England. 



The largest assemblage of stoneware and sagger 

 fragments came from the vicinity of the restored 

 Swan Tavern, although the actual relationship of the 

 pieces, one to another, was not recorded in the Na- 

 tional Park Service's archeological report on the ex- 

 cavations. Nevertheless, the presence on the same 

 lot of fragments of pint tankards adorned with a 

 sprig-molded swan ornament (fig. 3) along with 

 numerous pieces of sagger (fig. 1 2) seemed 

 positive enough evidence. English tavern mugs of 

 the 18th century were frequently decorated with an 

 applied panel copying the sign which hung out- 

 side the hostelry. 67 The Swan Tavern at Yorktown 

 was probably no exception, and to the often illiterate 

 traveler it would have been identified either by a 

 painted sign or perhaps by a swan carved in wood 



and set above the entrance. The significance of the 

 swan-decorated tankards is simply that the tavern 

 keeper would have been unlikely to have sent to 

 England for such objects when, as the saggers so 

 loudly proclaim, a local potter could supply them 

 as needed and without cost of transportation. 



The above reasoning seemed to link the saggers 

 with brown salt-glazed stonewares rather than with 

 products in the Rhenish tradition, which would have 

 been the other obvious possibility. 65 Wasters were 

 thinly represented among the sherds from Yorktown, 

 although many underfired or overburned pieces were 

 initially claimed as such. A more mature study of 

 the Yorktown potter's products has shown that these 

 variations would not have been considered unsalable, 

 nor, in all probability, would they have been marked 

 down as "seconds." Examples exhibiting both ex- 

 tremes of temperature have been found in domestic 

 rubbish pits at Williamsburg, clearly showing that 

 such pieces did find a ready sale. Figure 4 illustrates 

 a mug fragment from Williamsburg with a large, 

 heavily salted roof-dripping lodged above the handle 

 and overflowing the rim, a blemish the presence of 

 which is hard to explain if the mug was fired in a 

 sagger. Such a piece found in the vicinity of a kiln 

 reasonably could be considered a waster. It must be 

 deduced, therefore, that, providing the Yorktown pot- 

 ter's vessels would hold water and stand more or less 

 vertically on a table, they would find a market. 



The site of Rogers' kilns in or near Yorktown has 

 not been found, nor have his waster tips and pits 

 been located. In the absence of such concrete evi- 

 dence, a study of his wares may be thought premature. 

 But, while numerous questions obviously remain to be 

 answered, sufficient data have now been gathered to 



66 Adrian Oswald, "A London Stoneware Pottery, Recent 

 Excavations at Bankside," The Connoisseur (January 1951), vol. 

 126, no. 519, pp. 183-185. 



"J. F. Blacker, The A. B.C. of English Salt-Glaze Stoneware 

 (London: 1922), pp. 46, 48, 51, 56, 57, 63, and (•',. 



'•* Kiln waste found in recent excavations in Philadelphia in- 

 dicate that Anthony Duche was manufacturing stoneware 

 there in the style of Wester wa Id in the 1730s. 



PAPER 54: THE POOR POTTER OF YORKTOWN 



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