Ceramics in Maryland.(Homewood House Museum.)

In the early eighteenth century affluent American colonists were ordering household goods and luxury items made all over the world. More specifically, archaeological findings and period documents confirm that as early as the mid-seventeenth century ceramics were shipped from ports around Europe and England to consumers in Maryland. As Diana Edwards, an independent ceramics scholar, has written, "It was not uncommon to find throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century a single household which contained a variety of ceramics: jugs, food storage vessels and chamber pots of Rhenish and Westerwald manufacture, sgraffitto wares from North Devon, and tin-glazed earthenwares from either the Netherlands or England." Dutch, and later British and American traders brought Chinese porcelains to the American colonies. Some one hundred objects selected by Ms. Edwards with the assistance of the curator of the Homewood House Museum in Baltimore, Catherine Rogers Arthur, comprise an exhibition entitled Taste and Table: Ceramics in Early Maryland. All of the objects on view at Homewood House (from September 4 through November 30) have a history of ownership in Maryland before 1832.

Trade with Marylanders was based on the exchange of European-made goods such as ceramics, glass, textiles, and wine for American tobacco. Because the tobacco was not always ready to be loaded onto the ships soon after they came into port, some vessels were forced to wait in the harbor. Inns and taverns drew much business from those awaiting the tobacco harvest. Recent archaeology accomplished at the site of the Edward Rumney/ Stephen West Tavern in London Town (now Edgewater), Maryland, for example, has revealed that a wide variety of ceramics were used there in 1725, the date of the excavated pit. Shards and near-complete examples found at this dig can be related to pieces that have descended in some of Maryland's most well-known and influential families, among them Carrolls, Calverts, Gilmors, Lloyds, Ridgelys, and Pacas. Of the 198 ceramic pieces discovered at the site, about ninety percent were English made.

In the earliest periods, to a large extent, what Maryland ...