The Middleton Place Privy House / An Archeological View of Nineteenth Century Plantation Life

by Helen Haskell

GLASS TABLEWARE

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 13]A 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 14]B 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.