The Earthenwares

Besides the stonewares, the inventory includes the following items of earthenware:

This listing might be read to indicate that the Yorktown factory produced considerably less earthenware than stoneware, a construction that could be supported by the earlier inventory reference to "a pcl crakt redware" with a value of only £2 as against the £5 worth of "crackt" stoneware. We may wonder whether a ratio of 40 to 60 percent may not be a reasonable guide to the proportionate output of coarse-ware and stoneware, although it must be admitted that we do not know the relative sizes of the two parcels of cracked wares. It must be added also that, besides the inventory, the only extant direct documentary reference to the Rogers' factory products (1745) is to earthenware, not stoneware. Furthermore, we know that 20 years earlier he had sold a considerable quantity of earthenware to John Mercer of Marlborough.

Prior to the discovery of the Yorktown evidence we had known of no stoneware manufacturing in Tidewater Virginia in the 18th century, but archeological evidence had revealed the presence of earthenware kilns in the 17th century, with the possibility of two or three operating at much the same time.[265] It can easily be argued that there would have been more in the 18th century, though no kiln sites have yet been found. These considerations cannot be ignored, and consequently we must carefully avoid the trap of attributing all 18th-century, lead-glazed earthenwares made from Tidewater clay to the Rogers factory. A wood-fired Yorktown kiln burning pottery made from Peninsula clay and coated with a clear lead glaze would produce wares possessing variations of texture and color similar to those emerging from a comparable kiln, say, at Williamsburg.[266] Therefore, in attempting to assess the range and importance of Rogers' earthenwares we must use potting techniques alone as our guide to their identification.

Figure 18.—Unglazed earthenware bottle, probably of Yorktown manufacture, discarded about 1765. Found in Williamsburg. Surviving height 23.81 centimeters.

The principal evidence comes from the cut beside Main Street in Yorktown in front of the Digges House,[267] where numerous rim fragments of overfired and unglazed creampans were found. Others were recovered from the edges of the roadways on three sides of the adjacent colonial lots 51 and 55, shown on the 18th-century plat (Watkins, fig. 1) as having belonged to William Rogers. The rims from these deposits flared slightly, were tooled inward, and were flattened on the upper surface (fig. 13, no. 1). Fragments of such bowls, usually coated on the inside with a mottled lead glaze varying in color from light ginger to the tone and appearance of molasses, depending on the color of the body, are frequently found in Williamsburg (fig. 14) and on plantation sites in contexts of the second quarter of the 18th century. This creampan form is one of two made from Virginia clay which constantly turn up in contemporaneous archeological deposits. The second form (figs. 13, no. 2, and 15) possesses an everted and rolled rim,[268] an entirely different technique from that described above. I am inclined to doubt that these and their variants were made at the Rogers factory and have termed them products of the "rolled-rim" potter. Nevertheless, a few unglazed fragments of such pans (fig. 13, nos. 2-4) are represented in the National Park Service collections from uncertain archeological contexts in Yorktown.[269] The fact that they are unglazed suggests that they may have been made there, though undoubtedly not by the craftsman who threw the flattened-rim creampans.

Other earthenware sherds from the Digges House group include small, folded-rim fragments which may have come from storage jars or flowerpots. Another fragment was sharply everted over a pronouncedly incurving body. This could have been part of a small bowl or porringer. The Williamsburg archeological collections include a number of bowls of this form, one of which is illustrated in figure 16. A similar rim form is present on a pair of lead-glazed funnels (fig. 17) from a mid-18th-century context at the Coke Garrett House in Williamsburg and on a presumed funnel fragment (fig. 13, no. 5) in the Park Service collection from Yorktown.[270] Also from Yorktown comes the only known porringer fragment (fig. 13, no. 6), a biscuit sherd with a flattened rim and traces of the luting for a handle.[271] Although the type is not represented among stratified finds from Yorktown, mention must be made of an unglazed earthenware water (?) bottle found in Williamsburg,[272] which is clearly a stoneware form and thus probably was made at the Yorktown factory (fig. 18).

Perhaps the most baffling item listed in Rogers' inventory was the reference to "4 doz bird bottles 12/", for it was hard to imagine that he would have been making the small feeder bottles for cages which were normally fashioned in glass. However, it now seems reasonably certain that the Rogers bird bottles were actually bird houses. Figure 19 illustrates two bottle-shaped vessels of Virginia earthenware coated with lead glazes identical in color to examples found on a creampan and other presumably Rogers products excavated in Yorktown. The example on the left has lost its mouth but when complete was undoubtedly comparable to the specimen at right. The former was found in 1935 during the demolition of a chimney of the "Pyle House" at Green Spring near Jamestown.[273] It was mortared into the chimney twelve feet above the ground with its broken mouth facing out but with its base stopping short of the flue. The bottle is now in the collection of the National Park Service at Jamestown, and a recent examination showed that it still contained a lens of washed soil lying in the belly clearly indicating the position in which it had been seated in the chimney brickwork. A stick had been thrust through the wall before firing and emerged on the inside at the same point that the lens of dirt was resting. It was apparent, therefore, that the hole was meant for drainage. The stick hole was present in both bottles as also was an ante cocturam cut in the base (fig. 20) which removed almost half of the bottom plus a vertical triangle. It is believed that this feature was intended to enable the bottles to be hooked over pintles or large nails which latched into the V and prevented them from rolling. In this way they could have been mounted under the eaves of frame buildings as nesting boxes (or bottles) and although firmly secure when hooked, they could be easily lifted off for cleaning. Evidence of such use is provided by slight chipping on the inner face of the vertical V cut of the second bottle (right) where the bottle had abraded against the nail or pintle.

The date of the Green Spring bottle is uncertain, though the paper label accompanying it says "Probably 1720, date of building of house." However, it is clear that the bottle was not installed in the intended portable manner and it is possible that it was added at a later date. The complete example (fig. 19, right) was recently discovered in a sound archeological context during excavations at the James Geddy House in Williamsburg, being associated with a large refuse deposit dating in the period about 1740-60.[274]

It may be noted that in the 1746 inventory of the estate of John Burdett, tavern keeper of Williamsburg, there are listed "16 bird Bottles 3/".[275] As it seems unlikely that a tavern keeper would have a stock of birdcage bottles when he apparently had no birdcage, it may be suggested that the reference is to bottles similar to those discussed here. In support of this conclusion, attention is drawn to the fact that Rogers' new bottles were valued at 3d each, while Burdett's (used?) seven years later were appraised at 2-1/4d.[276]

Figure 19.—Two earthenware "bird bottles" believed to be of Rogers' lead-glazed earthenware showing drainage holes in sides. Bottle on left is from a house chimney near Green Spring and, on right, is from the James Geddy House in Williamsburg. Height 18.42 centimeters, and 21.91 centimeters, respectively.

It seems evident that the Rogers earthenware was fired to biscuit, glazed, and fired again in a glost oven; no other explanation accounts for the large quantities of unglazed earthenware found at Yorktown. Mr. Maloney's experiments at the Williamsburg Pottery have amply demonstrated that the Yorktown earthenware could have been glazed in the green state and would not have required a second firing. Furthermore, the study of a late-17th-century kiln site in James City County has confirmed that not all potters thought it necessary to make glazing a separate process. It is curious that the Rogers factory found it desirable to take this second and seemingly uneconomical step. The making of stoneware certainly would not have been a double-firing operation, and, although some of the pieces actually are fired no higher than the earthenware, they have been slipped and salted. Consequently we must accept the bottle discussed above as an intentional earthenware item which had passed through only the first kiln. Furthermore, its presence in Williamsburg indicates that it was never meant to be glazed. And finally, it should be noted that an unglazed handle fragment, probably from a similar bottle, was among the sherds recovered from the roadway in front of the Digges House.

Figure 20.—Bases of the "bird bottles" depicted in figure 19, showing holes for suspension. Base diameters: left, 10.48 centimeters; right, 10.16 centimeters.