Helen Woolford Haskell UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA INSTITUTE OF ARCHEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY POPULAR SERIES 1 Columbia, South Carolina September, 1981 The University of South Carolina offers equal opportunity in its employment, admissions and educational activities, in accordance with Title IX, section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and other civil rights laws....

I wish to thank Harvey S. Teal and George B. Hartness of Columbia, South Carolina; M. Mellanay Delham of Charlotte, North Carolina; Harmon Wray of Memphis, Tennessee; and Jan B. Eklund of the Smithsonian Museum for assistance with the artifact analysis. The original research was funded by a grant from the South Carolina Coastal Council. This publication was made possible by a grant from the South Carolina Committee for the Humanities, whose support is gratefully acknowledged. The Middleton Place

The land that now comprises Middleton Place lies in one of the earliest areas inhabited by Englishmen in South Carolina. In 1674, just four years after the first colonists settled at Charles Town, Lord Proprietor Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper granted lands for settlement along the lower reaches of the Ashley River. Among these was the site of Middleton Place, deeded in 1675 to Jacob Waight. Waight apparently forfeited his claim to the tract, and in 1700, it was granted to Richard Godfrey, who sold i

Modern historical archeology, like archeology in general, is based on two main premises. First, where man has lived for any length of time, he has left behind artifacts—bits of food, broken pottery, tools, and ornaments—that tell us something of his way of life. Second, human behavior is, to a certain extent, patterned and predictable, and similar artifacts will be found on similar sites. Thus, even if two household sites are separated by hundreds of years of technological innovation, they may y

The Industrial Revolution introduced an era of mass production, technological efficiency, and mass consumption. One of its minor miracles was the perfection of a hard-boiled white ceramic that was within the financial reach of most of the population. Though hardly striking to the modern eye, the white ironstone plates pictured below ( Fig. 2 ) are the result of years of experimentation by British and other European potters. In durability, purity of color, and cost-effectiveness, the everyday iro

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

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most bottles in the United States and England were either free-blown—formed on the end of a blowpipe without aid of a mold—or blown into a one-piece “dip mold” that formed only the basic body shape. Neither of these processes allowed large-scale production of oddly shaped or embossed containers, and since even dip-molded bottles were formed by hand above the shoulder, the bottles tended to be asymmetrical. Hinged two-piece molds, capable of shaping the

As glass manufacturing expanded after the Civil War, so did the pharmaceutical industry. Pharmacology became a more exact science than it ever had been, and its practitioners dispensed their compound medicines in glass bottles that for the first time were available in precisely graduated sizes and a variety of shapes often tailored to suit specific products. Early post-war bottles were usually made in the aquamarine of “green” glass that had become traditional for apothecaries’ wares, but use of

Perhaps the oldest use for glass bottles has been the storage and transport of alcohol. Some of the oldest bottles from the Middleton Place privy are wine and spirits bottles. Bottles made in the same dark green glass as the three pictured below left were used by the earliest colonists for various wines and spirits, and, although the bottle shapes have varied over the centuries, the tradition continues in the green wine bottles of the present day. With the improvement of glassmaking techniques i

The three late nineteenth century bottles shown below represent one of the oldest pastimes in America. Until the late nineteenth century, however, most American beers were locally produced ales, stouts, and porters that were not bottled but sold in kegs to taverns. Modern lager beer was first introduced by German immigrants in the 1840s, but it was not until the 1870s that the expanding railway system, together with the food preservation techniques developed by Louis Pasteur in 1870, made it fea

The South Carolina Dispensary system, in operation from 1893 to 1907, was a nearly unique and completely unsuccessful attempt to control alcohol abuse by placing a state’s entire retail liquor trade into the hands of its government. Touted by its sponsor, Governor “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, as a means of encouraging temperance, guaranteeing purity of product, and returning alcohol revenues to the citizens, the dispensary was born as an eleventh hour compromise between pro- and anti-Prohibition for

Although olive oil, pickles, and other foods that do not require sterilization have been packed in glass and ceramic containers for centuries, the preserving of hot foods in airtight glass or metal containers is a comparatively recent development. Housewives in the eighteenth century knew how to preserve fruits by boiling them in glass jars that were subsequently corked and sealed with wax, glue, or pitch, but the idea of canning as we know it was popularized by Nicholas Appert, a French confect

This final group of bottles and jars have nothing in common except their date. The two clear glass bottles at left are standard desktop ink bottles made after the 1904 introduction of the Owens bottle machine and before screw top inks replaced the corked variety around 1930 ( Fig. 25 ). The conical ink in the center was one of the earliest shapes for desk-top ink bottles, introduced when ink was first bottled in small individual containers in the 1840s. The contents of the ointment jar at right,

In 1859, drillers in Pennsylvania brought in the nation’s first producing oil well, an event that was to alter radically the lives of generations of Americans. The first revolution achieved by this versatile new fuel was not in mechanical power, but in lighting. A working oil field made possible the manufacture of kerosene, a promising coal and petroleum-based illuminant that had been patented in New York in 1854 but had not been put into production because of the scarcity of one of its principa

Figure 29 is a laboratory beaker of a type manufactured in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, probably a relic of William and Susan Middleton’s inventor son Henry. It is free-blown in lead glass, one of many glass compositions used for American laboratory equipment before Corning Glass Works introduced low-expansion Pyrex glass in 1915. Figure 29. Free-blown laboratory beaker, probably late 19th or early 20th century. Henry lived at Middleton Place with his parents until the 1870s, wh

The artifacts from the Middleton Place privy present a unique opportunity to observe one aspect of this plantation’s past. This collection of ceramics, bottles, and other items constitute the refuse discarded by the occupants of Middleton Place following the Civil War. It reflects their needs and tastes and represents an unconscious record of activities a century ago. Artifacts in the collection include items from an earlier time as well as things purchased throughout the last half of the ninete

Free-blown bottles usually date before the second half of the nineteenth century and are characterized by an absence of mold lines of any sort. Because no molds were used, these bottles are often asymmetrical. Dip-molded bottles, or bottles molded for basic body shape below the shoulder, are also generally pre-Civil War and can only tentatively be distinguished from free-blown bottles by their symmetry below the shoulder and a slight tapering from shoulder to base. Bottles blown in a two-piece m

The information contained in this booklet is a partial synopsis of archeological reports published by the Institute of Archeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina, as Numbers 148 and 174 of the Research Manuscript Series . For a detailed treatment of the history and archeology of Middleton Place, and a complete listing of bibliographic sources, the reader is referred to Middleton Place: initial archeological investigations at an Ashley River rice plantation by Kenneth E. Lewis and