Face Vessel
date: label: date made
content: mid 1800s
name: label: maker
content: unknown
notes: label: Description
content: Between the late 1600s and the Civil War, the rapid growth of the southern plantation economy and a sparse white population led to increasing reliance on the labor of enslaved blacks. Most were agricultural laborers, but a significant number were craftspeople. Among these skilled enslaved people were a small number of potters working in the Edgefield District of South Carolina. Anecdotal and archeological evidence has been used to establish that enslaved potters were making face vessels in the Edgefield area before the Civil War.
label: Description
content: The origins of the southern face vessel tradition are largely un-documented. Some enslaved black potters in South Carolina certainly began making face vessels in the mid 1800s, possibly inspired by African burial rituals or as charms used in religious ceremonies. The contrasting eyes and teeth on most of the slave-made face vessels are kaolin clay, a key ingredient in the manufacture of porcelain. The Edgefield area of South Carolina was known in the 1700s and 1800s for its rich supply of kaolin.
label: Description
content: A number of face vessels have been linked stylistically to enslaved potters at Thomas Davies’ Palmetto Firebrick Works, which operated in the mid-1860s, and Lewis Miles’s Stoney Bluff and Miles Mill potteries operating from about 1837-1894. As late as 1900, ceramics historian Edwin A. Barber felt it was necessary to state that face vessels similar to these were not made in Africa, as was supposed by some collectors, but by African American potters who were enslaved at Edgefield potteries.
label: Description
content: This piece, on the right, may have been at at Lewis Miles’s pottery and came to the museum in the 1920s after the death of Mary Elizabeth Sinnott, a Washington, DC collector.
place: label: Place Made
content: United States: South Carolina, Edgefield
label: Associated Place
content: United States: South Carolina, Edgefield
setName: label: See more items in
content: Home and Community Life: Ceramics and Glass
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content: Face Vessels
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content: Cultures & Communities
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content: Work
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content: Artifact Walls exhibit
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content: Domestic Furnishings
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: The Estate of Mary Elizabeth Sinnott
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: CE.324313
label: accession number
content: 68233
label: catalog number
content: 324313
objectType: label: Object Name
content: face vessel
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: ceramic, stoneware (overall material)
label: Physical Description
content: kaolin (overall material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 5 in x 3 in; 12.7 cm x 7.62 cm