18th Century Slipware Recovered in Canada and Charlestown, Massachusetts

Over two years ago, I identified on this website, an eighteenth century slip-decorated red earthenware chamber pot that had been recovered within a circa 1755-60 archaeological context at the Fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. The pot had been published as French production in 1969. However, I recognized the pot as actually having been manufactured at the industry in Charlestown, Massachusetts, which has since been published in a feature story I wrote for the April 2017 issue of the New England Antiques Journal, entitled, 'A Pioneering Potter: Samuel Marshall of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.'

There was a lot of Colonial seventeenth and eighteenth-century slipware excavated in the twentieth-century by archaeologists at the Fortress of Louisbourg, including a wide variety of wares made in France and England. But it seems that Massachusetts production also occasionally migrated north, based on archaeological artifacts recovered at this site, as well as Colonial sites elsewhere in Canada.

Nevertheless, while recently reading through the Fortress of Louisbourg Archaeology Report, I recognized an English slipware earthenware dish excavated in a mid-eighteenth-century context. While the production of this object is not exactly the same, it reminded me of one of my all-time favorite artifacts excavated by archaeologists in Charlestown in the 1980s, as part of Boston's infamous Big Dig Project.

Slipware Recovered in Canada and Charlestown, Massachusetts

Mid-18th Century Slipware Earthenware Dish

Probably Made in Staffordshire, England

Excavated from a Privy at the Site of the Three Cranes Tavern in Charlestown, Mass.

See Article for More Information

Photo Courtesy: Massachusetts Historical Commission

Mid-18th Slipware Earthenware Dish

Probably Made in Staffordshire, England

Excavated at the Fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia

See Article for More Information

Photo Courtesy: Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site, Parks Canada

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