452 ANNUAL REPORT SAnTHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1953 



had drunk his tea, here a piece of creamware from the Raleigh Tavern, 

 here a fragment of the costly Lowestoft which once had adorned the 

 palace diningroom. Of especial interest were several pieces of Lowes- 

 toft bearing Lord Dunmore's coat-of-arms. The Governor, when he 

 fled from the wrath of the patriots at the beginning of the Revolution, 

 had been forced to leave most of his personal belongings behind, and 

 his china, together with other things, seems to have been destroyed 

 by the fire of 1781. 



Unlike iron and glass, china is not seriously affected by a long stay 

 under earth, so that it was an easy matter to clean the recovered frag- 

 ments. When this had been done, the archeologists attempted the 

 more difficult task of piecing them together as though they had been 

 bits of a jigsaw puzzle. Often this proved impossible, but in some 

 cases a vase, or a bowl, or a saucer was almost entirely restored. 



The people of Williamsburg were especially fond of a yellow or 

 cream-colored English earthernware first perfected by Josiah Wedg- 

 wood and subsequently made by other potters in various colors, 

 degrees of hardness, and quality. When attempts to find sets of 

 an especially popular pattern of this ware proved unsuccessful, a 

 representative of colonial Williamsburg went to the Wedgwood works 

 to ask whether it would be possible to make an accurate reproduction. 

 To his surprise, the management, after a brief search, reported that 

 they still had most of the molds from which the original sets were 

 made, the patterns for others, and Josiah Wedgwood's formulae for 

 the clay mixtures. So today, Anthony Hay, if he could visit the 

 Raleigh Tavern of which he formerly was proprietor, would be 

 astonished to find that of his set of creamware, with its 139 plates, 5 

 sauce boats and dishes, 2 fruit baskets, to all appearances many pieces 

 had survived the vicissitudes of 175 years. 



But had he passed on to the Old Court House to view the archeologi- 

 cal exhibit, he would not have believed that some of the bits of glass 

 there had once belonged to wine bottles from his cellar or goblets from 

 his diningroom, for glass which in his day had been clear had now 

 become scaly and iridescent under the action of time and earth. Yet 

 glass, too, yielded evidence that was invaluable to the work of restora- 

 tion. This bit came from a baglike bottle in common use in the seven- 

 teenth century, this from a round bottle with fairly straight sides char- 

 acteristic of the eighteen century, this from a square bottle which had 

 contained Dutch gin. Especially interesting are the many bottle 

 buttons, or circular stamps on the glass bearing the owner's name or 

 initials. Two buttons marked F. N., one unearthed from an early 

 foundation near the Capitol and another in the vicinity of the Wren 

 Building, undoubtedly came from bottles belonging to Sir Francis 

 Nicholson. 



