Curator’s Curio: A Pipe and a Coat of Arms

Lily Carhart, Curator of Preservation Collections, George Washington’s Mount Vernon In 2019 while cataloguing and photographing artifacts from recent excavations at George Washington’s Mount Vernon in the area south of the Kitchen outbuilding, a member of the archaeology team identified a tobacco pipe stem stamped with an elaborate coat of arms. This discovery started a multiyear journey into studying the …