Karen McIlvoy, Archaeology Laboratory Supervisor for Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest

The technology to safely cook over an open flame is very old. Cooking pots and utensils with long handles, Dutch ovens, trivets, tongs, and other tools were all used to ensure that cooks were able to prepare food without hurting themselves. One of the tools used that we rarely hear about today is the trammel. A trammel was one of several devices used to hang a cooking pot over a fire. Unlike a traditional pot hook or an S-hook, a trammel consisted of two interlocking iron pieces that slid vertically and locked into place at different points. This allowed the cook to adjust the height of the pot relative to the fire, thus increasing or reducing the heat as needed. Trammels could be made in a range of sizes, from 5 feet to a few inches in length, so they were versatile enough to be used in any size hearth.

Ratchet-style trammels (using a series of saw-toothed steps as locks) had been used in Western cooking since at least the Middle Ages. By the 17^th century, the pole-and-hole style was more common, in which one piece locks into one of a series of holes punched through the length of the other. Trammels were hung from a wood or iron bar or “lug pole” set inside the chimney. If the lug pole was made of wood, it was most often a sturdy green sapling that would occasionally need to be replaced so that it didn’t dry out or catch fire. By the 1700s, the hinged fireplace crane began to replace the trammel. However, cranes and trammels continued to be used concurrently until they were both replaced by the cast iron stove.

This trammel was found in a root cellar discovered by archaeologists in 1989 beneath the first floor of Poplar Forest’s still standing 1857 Slave Dwelling. It was likely used by the building’s African American residents for cooking in one of the brick hearths set into the building’s single central chimney. During construction, an iron bar was embedded into the chimney stack on at least one side and an iron chain pot hook still remains attached. It is probably that the trammel was suspended from either the same or a similar bar that has since been removed due to 20^th century renovations.

All metal objects corrode when exposed to oxygen. Water and salt speed up the process. Iron is especially susceptible and in Virginia, where the weather cycles through periods of wet and dry and warm and cold, iron artifacts in the ground rust relatively quickly. Metal artifacts that have been recovered archaeologically must be treated with care in the lab or they will fall apart. They are allowed to dry completely before being stored in special bags to reduce the amount of oxygen exposure. Specialists then use a variety of techniques to chemically stabilize artifacts so they can be better studied, including manually removing corrosion, soaking artifacts in de-ionized water, and passing electrical currents through the objects. This process can take anywhere from weeks to years depending on the details of the artifact. The trammel from the 1857 Slave Dwelling was conserved by the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory in 2019.

References:

Crump, Nancy Carter. 2009. Hearthside Cooking: Early American Southern Cuisine Updated for Today’s Hearth and Cookstove. University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, NC.

Plummer, Don. 1999. Colonial Wrought Iron. The Sorber Collection.

Image Captions:

Image 1:

A trammel hangs down within the fireplace and holds a kettle above the fire as children gather around it. Harper’s Weekly magazine, December 30, 1876.

Image 2:

Iron trammel found at Poplar Forest, after conservation by Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory.

Beth Bollwerk, Project Manager for the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS)

Welcome back to COVA’s Curio Corner – a quarterly feature where we highlight a particularly interesting artifact, or artifact type, from an archaeological project in Virginia. This Corner’s artifact – a Chinese Porcelain wine cup that dates to the first half of the 17th century – comes from the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery’s (DAACS, www.daacs.org) ongoing project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, “The Origins of Slave Society: Digitizing Flowerdew Hundred”. DAACS is a web-based initiative designed to foster inter-site, comparative archaeological research on slavery throughout the Chesapeake, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean. Our goal is to help scholars from different disciplines use archaeological evidence to advance our historical understanding of the slave-based society that evolved in the Atlantic World during the colonial and ante-bellum periods. For more details about the grant see: https://www.monticello.org/press/news-releases/neh-awards-monticello-two-new-grants-nearly-1-million-within-a-year/

This wine cup, fragments of which are shown here, was excavated from the Fortified Compound at Flowerdew Hundred (44PG65). Historic documents suggest George Yeardley, the owner of Flowerdew Hundred, who served as the colonial governor of Virginia and was one of the first enslavers in British North America, had the fortification constructed during the first quarter of the 17th century primarily as defense against Spanish or Native incursions. However, the sheer diversity of artifact types found within the fortified compound suggests that during its occupation in the first and second quarter of the 17th century it served multiple roles, from a military compound and slave quarter to housing for elite Englishmen. Late Medieval plate armor, lead shot, matchlock gun parts, sword parts, and cannon balls are intermingled with expensive, high style imported ceramics, copper alloy adornment items, glass beads, and tobacco pipes. Future DAACS analyses will examine what the distribution of these different artifact types on the site can tell us about its inhabitants, including some of the first Africans who were enslaved in North America.  

Seventeenth century wine cups were miniature, delicate drinking vessels. Cousins to the small but thicker Japanese Sake cup, some wine cups had a sinuous bell shape with a prominently flared rim. Others, like the one from Flowerdew, were nearly straight sided. Wine cups were a more costly, and showy, way for elites to drink distilled spirits during the Colonial Period in Europe and the British Atlantic. Made of Chinese Porcelain, these cups were delicate and so thin bodied that the porcelain is translucent even through the unusual toffee brown glaze and white slip floral decoration. The slipped decoration is a prunus branch, symbolizing the Daoist ideas of winter, longevity, beauty, and purity [1]. The cup from Flowerdew Hundred’s Fortified Compound was produced in Jingdezhen, a city in the Jiangzi province that is well-known for producing blue and white kraak porcelain for export during the first decades of the 17th century.  The slip decoration was introduced during the reign of the Emporer Wanli (r. 1562-1620).   

More than a dozen whole or partial examples of costly Chinese Porcelain hand painted blue wine cups have been recovered from sites occupied by the English in the early 17^th century along the James River [2]. However, there are only two known examples of wine cups from Virginia sites that exhibit the brown and white slip decoration – the six sherds from Flowerdew and a single sherd from Jamestown (also pictured here). If you’d like to learn more keep an eye out for a forthcoming publication by our colleague Merry Outlaw, Senior Curator at Jamestown Rediscovery, that reviews the history of 17^th century Chinese Porcelain objects excavated from Jamestown and other sites occupied in the early Colonial Period in Virginia, including Flowerdew — Following the Dragon: Late Ming Porcelain from the 1607 to ca.1624 James Fort, Jamestown, Virginia.

Bibliography

[1] Outlaw, Merry 2023 Personal Communication.

[2] Straube, Bly 2001 European Ceramics in the New World: The Jamestown Example. Ceramics in America, edited by Robert Hunter. https://chipstone.org/issue.php/2/Ceramics-in-America-2001

Caroline Gardiner, Veteran’s Curation Program

“What’s the date for our coin?”

“1790s.”

“They have the same one.”

In 2021, the Veterans Curation Program (VCP) in Alexandria received a 260-box collection from the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Norfolk District’s Gathright Dam/Lake Moomaw project. The Dam is located in west-central Virginia about 40 miles from Staunton. The area’s history covers thousands of years, resulting in a mixed assemblage from pre-Contact sites to 19^th to 20^th-century coal mining towns and farmsteads. The collection also includes a vast amount of archival records ranging from 1800s census records to field forms.

The VCP hires veterans to help care for at-risk USACE collections including artifact rehousing, cataloging, and photography. While working through the first Gathright boxes, technicians came across a small copper alloy Chinese coin. Its symbols spell out “Qianlong Tongbao,” translating to Emperor Qianlong (reign 1735-1796) and “coin.”[1] So how did it come halfway across the world to end up in the Appalachian Mountains?

Not long after beginning research on the coin for this newsletter, the Alexandria VCP team took a field trip to the nearby Freedom House Museum. One case displayed artifacts recovered in the 1984-5 excavations, including another Qianlong coin. What were the chances? And what did it mean for the Gathright coin interpretation?

The team hypothesizes four possible scenarios. To begin with the simplest, the Gathright coin is generally provenienced to a late 19^th/early 20^th-century house area, while the Alexandria example was recovered from post-Civil War fill in a dry well/privy.[2] While it is possible that Chinese individuals lived in the Gathright area, so far no records of them have been found in the site reports, census records, or land ownership documentation within the VCP archival collection. However, previous research into Alexandria archives revealed a steady growth of Chinese immigrants in that city throughout the 19-20^th centuries, with many establishing laundry businesses.[3] It is possible that residents brought these coins with them and merely lost or discarded them.

Second, both sites also have connections to railroads. The Shenandoah Railroad, completed in 1882, ran parallel to the Blue Ridge from Roanoake, VA to Hagerstown, MD with extensions reaching to Alexandria and DC. The 1880 Wheeling Register recorded “three hundred hands, including twenty-five Chinese” working near the Hagerstown stop.[4] They were among the thousands of Chinese laborers who built railroads across the entire United States (the Transcontinental Railroad had been completed only a decade before). It is entirely plausible that the owners of these coins were laborers following projects eastward.

Trade is another possible explanation, especially given Alexandria’s status as a port city. Several 20^th-century oral histories of the Gathright area mention harvesting ginseng (or “sanging”).[5] The Appalachian ginseng trade developed in the 19^th century and continues to be a cash crop today. Ginseng was transported to cities and as far as China where demand was high.[6] Could the coins be results of these interactions?  

We also cannot rule out simple collection. These coins symbolize foreign places and may have been used as “objects of curiosity” to display personal status or connections. They conveniently are already pierced and could have been worn on a string as a souvenir or luck charm. What was once, then, an everyday item of exchange became something personal and extraordinary. We can only speculate.

---

[1] Cao, Qin. “An Introduction and Identification Guide to Chinese Qing-Dynasty Coins.” National Museums Scotland. 2014. <https://www.nms.ac.uk/media/1161122/an-introduction-and-identification-guide-to-chinese-qing-dynasty-coins-qin-cao.pdf.> Accessed 23 August 2022.

[2] Artemel, Janice G., Elizabeth A. Crowell, and Jeff Parker. The Alexandria Slave Pen: The Archaeology of Urban Captivity. Engineering Science, Inc. Washington, D.C. 1987.

[3]  “Chinese Immigrants in Alexandria, VA.” Immigrant Alexandria Project. University of Mary Washington. 2016. <http://immigrantalexandria.org/chinese-immigrants-in-alexandria-va/.> Accessed 23 August 2022.

[4] Fisher Fishkin, Shelley. “Bibliographic Essay for The Chinese as Railroad Workers after Promontory.” Chinese Railroad works of North America Project. Stanford University. 2019. <www.chineserailroadworkers.stanford.edu.> Accessed 10 September 2022.

[5] Campbell, Dana, Norman Dean Jefferson, Clarence R. Geier, Bernadine McGuire, and Elwood Fisher. An Historic Commentary of the Jackson River Valley, Bath and Alleghany Counties, Virginia. Report submitted to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Norfolk District. Occasional Papers in Anthropology (13). James Madison University. 1982.

[6] Library of Congress. “American Ginseng and the Idea of the Commons: Historical Background.” Tending the Commons: Folklife and Landscape in Southern West Virginia in the Coal River Folklife Project Collection. Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 1999. <https://www.loc.gov/collections/folklife-and-landscape-in-southern-west-virginia/articles-and-essays/american-ginseng-and-the-idea-of-the-commons/historical-background/.> Accessed 5 September 2022.

Web Editor’s Note: The Curator’s Curio is a quarterly research brief highlighting interesting or unusual finds from archaeological collections throughout Virginia.

Tatiana Niculescu, Alexandria Archaeology

In 1977, archaeologists working on the 500 block of King Street in Alexandria were racing the clock and the bulldozers to recover the remains of the port city’s past. Deep in the bowels of a well, later used as a privy/dump (Feature 4, Levels 30 and 32) behind 518 King Street they found this small, bisque porcelain, anthropomorphized moon figurine among other artifacts associated with the early 1900s occupation of the site by the German Jewish Rosenfeld family.

The figurine is about 5 inches tall, powder blue, and depicts a grinning crescent moon wearing a dapper suit. The moon is rising out of what appear to be clouds and there are two white doves possibly kissing near the figure’s chest. The artifact does not have a maker’s mark, but was likely manufactured by Schafer and Vater, a German company who did not mark many of their itemsⁱ. The fine texture clay and the expressive face of this figurine are like those found on signed pieces by this firmⁱⁱ. In fact, AECOM archaeologists working in Philadelphia found a similar moon figurine in the Kingston-Fishtown area of the city, a region that was home to a German community in the nineteenth centuryⁱⁱⁱ.

The Schafer and Vater porcelain company opened in 1890 in Volkstedt Rudolstadt, Thuringia, Germany, was most active in the first two decades of the 20^th century and remained in operation until 1962^iv. Unfortunately, the company’s factory was seized by the East German government in the 1970s and few records or molds survived. Though best known for figural beer steins, Schafer and Vater also made figurines, including a series of celestial men and women in romantic and leisurely poses^v. Some of these were designed to emulate more expensive Wedgewood jasperware^vi and may have been purchased at affordable prices from Sears and Roebuck, the great equalizer of consumer goods, who began selling imported Shafer and Vater items in 1910^vii.

On the surface a piece like this was purely decorative, serving no other function than to be admired. Small decorative items were popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, often adorning parlor shelves and mantles, sparking wonderment and collecting dust. However, the figurine was also a material symbol of Jennie and Max Rosenfeld’s identities and aspirations^viii. From his spot on the mantle, the moon man served as a small reminder of Max’s German homeland and Jennie’s German heritage, a message perhaps only readily known to the Rosenfelds. Additionally, this little knick-knack provided a tangible symbol of the family’s economic and social aspirations as American citizens. The Rosenfelds chose to purchase a more economical Schafer and Vater figurine that outwardly looked like the more expensive products used by their well-established, white, Protestant neighbors while using the money they saved for other purposes like acquiring real estate and creating a legacy for their family. This moon man, excavated from the depths of an Old Town Alexandria shaft feature, embodies the identity and aspirations of one Jewish family who called the port city home over a century ago.

i Kovels 2021 Schafer & Vater. https://www.kovels.com/antique-collectibles-prices/schafer-vater. Accessed 5 October 2021.

ii Carlo Peto n.d. Schafer and Vater: German Figural Flasks, Nippers, & Giveaways. http://www.schafer-vater.com/. Accessed 20 November 2021.

iii Digging I-95 Interactive Artifacts-Moon Man Figurine. AECOM, Philadelphia, PA. https://diggingi95.com/interactive-artifacts/moon-man/. Accessed 21 October 2021.

2020b Neighborhood Snapshot: Kensington-Fishtown. AECOM, Philadelphia, PA. https://diggingi95.com/kensington-fishtown/. Accessed 21 October 2021.

Rebecca White, 2016 Serenading Moon Man: The Curious Tale About the Man in the Moon. River Chronicles 1:26-29.

iv Peter P. Spirito, 2013, Schafer & Vater Porcelain, Prosit, March 2013:38.

v White, Serenading Moon Man.

vi Arthur Schwerdt 2008 They’re Naughty and Nice: Schafer and Vater Ceramics. Cape May Herald, 29 February. Cape May, NJ. https://www.capemaycountyherald.com/lifestyle/article_5fee983e- 5f97-5261-ac39-0e449c64da55.html. Accessed 30 January 2022.

vii Peto, Schafer and Vater: German Figural Flasks, Nippers, & Giveaways.

viii Paul Mullins, 1999 Race and Affluence: An Archaeology of African-America and Consumer

Culture. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Press, New York, NY.

The Curator’s Curio is a quarterly research brief highlighting interesting or unusual finds from archaeological collections throughout Virginia. If you have an artifact to share, please reach out to the Council of Virginia Archaeologists Collections Committee co-chairs, Leah Stricker (lstricker@preservationvirginia.org) and Caroline Gardiner (cgardiner@newsouthassoc.com) for details.