Ivor Noël Hume
The Salt-Glazed Stoneware
Attention was first drawn to the potential importance of the 18th-century pottery factory at Yorktown in 1956 when an examination of the National Park Service artifacts from the town revealed large quantities of stoneware sagger fragments visually identical to those previously retrieved from a site at Bankside in London.[247] 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 typically English, were found to have reacted slightly differently 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 National Park Service's archeological report on the excavations. 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. 12) seemed positive enough evidence. English tavern mugs of the 18th century were frequently decorated with an applied panel copying the sign which hung outside the hostelry.[248] 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.[249] 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 extremes 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 potter'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 evidence, 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 identify a considerable range of brown stoneware as being of Tidewater Virginia manufacture. There is, of course, good reason to suppose that much, if not all, of it is a product of the Rogers factory, although until that site is dug one cannot be certain. It can be argued, perhaps, that if there was one more or less clandestine stoneware potter at work in the area, there might well be others. It could also be added that two earthenware-pottery-making sites have been discovered in the Jamestown-Williamsburg area for which no documentary evidence has been found. The very fact that such enterprise was officially discouraged reduces the value of the negative evidence to be derived from the absence of documentation.
The most convincing evidence for the identification of Rogers' stoneware comes from the already mentioned Swan Tavern mugs and from a quantity of sherds found in a 4-to 7-inch layer beneath Yorktown's Main Street in front of the Digges House in the spring of 1957. This material was exposed during the laying of utilities beside the modern roadway. So tightly packed were the fragments of saggers and pottery vessels that they appeared to have been deliberately laid down as metaling for the colonial street. Several years later Mr. Watkins discovered that in 1734 William Rogers had been appointed "Surveyor of the Landings, Streets; and Cosways in York Town." It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that Rogers disposed of his kiln waste by using it for hard core to make good the roads under his jurisdiction. Such a use of potters' refuse has ample precedent in that the wasters and sagger fragments from the 17th-century-London delftware kilns were dumped on the foreshore of the river Thames to serve the same purpose. Similarly, stoneware waste from the presumed Bankside factory[250] was used there to line the bottoms of trenches for wooden drains.
The pottery fragments found in the Yorktown road metaling comprised unglazed, coarse-earthenware pans and bowls; pieces of badly fired, brown, salt-glazed stoneware jars and bottles; and numerous sagger fragments.
In the years since interest first was shown in the products of the Yorktown factory, a useful range of examples has been gathered from excavations in Williamsburg and in neighboring counties. The single most significant item was recovered from another kiln site in James City County (known as the Challis site) on the bank of the James River. This object, a pint mug (fig. 5), is the best preserved specimen yet found. It is impressed on the upper wall, opposite the handle, with a pseudo-official capacity stamp[251] comprising the initials W R beneath a crown (William III Rex) which, perhaps, might have led to an intentional misinterpretation as the mark of William Rogers' factory. The official English marks generally were incuse or stamped in relief with the cypher and crown within a borderless oval. They were always placed close to the rim, just left of the handle. Rogers' stamp was set in a much more pretentious position and was enclosed within a rectangle marking the edges of the matrix (fig. 6).
The Challis site mug was a key piece of evidence, being the first example found that illustrated the position of the W R stamp, and it was sufficiently intact for a drawing to be made, its capacity measured, and its variations of firing studied. The association of the Challis mug with the Rogers factory is based on the fact that there is an identical stamp among the Park Service's artifacts from Yorktown (fig. 7), along with another pseudo W R stamp which had been applied to the base of a tankard.