As I noted in a post from earlier this week, there was a lot of maritime activity that took place on Cape Code, Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. And with that came goods from a variety of manufacturers.
While reviewing a collection of red earthenware artifacts recently that were recovered from various archaeological contexts on Nantucket owned by the Nantucket Historical Association, I was surprised to see a selection of multi-colored slipware sherds that resembled wares produced in southeastern Pennsylvania and possibly Philadelphia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
The examples that I have posted below are the sherds that I thought displayed the most distinctive slip patterns, although they were not all recovered from the same archaeological context. The first sherd was recovered from a house site in Polpis which is a village on Nantucket, while the remaining sherds were recovered during some construction work in the 1980s around Sherburne Hall on Centre Street on Nantucket. But these sherds may predate the building seeing that it was built in 1846. Although, its construction came just after the island's Great Fire in that same year that destroyed a number of Nantucket's buildings. Nonetheless, it is likely that all of these red earthenware artifacts predate the fire.
Note: The Nantucket Historical Association owns a number of artifacts related to the Great Fire of 1846.
Possibly Southeastern Pennsylvania Slipware Recovered on Nantucket
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