All the Best Rubbish

by Ivor Noel Hume

  It is possible that Daniel Parke was unamused by all this and that he said so, for John Custis subsequently reneged on the deed of gift which had left Jack his land in perpetuity. It was now to revert to Daniel Parke and his heirs upon Jack’s death, and as it turned out Custis could thereby have been signing the boy’s death warrant. Among other provisions in John Custis’s will was the bequest of a painting of Jack to Mrs. Anne Moody, the wife of a tavern keeper on Williamsburg’s Capitol Landing Road. It was the only picture specifically identified in the will, and one might therefore conclude that Custis feared for its safety and could no longer rely on Daniel Parke (and particularly his wife) to love Jack like a brother. John did not trust anybody very much; so suspicious was he that he even expressed concern lest someone might do something tricky with his own corpse. The will gave explicit instructions about obtaining a tombstone, specifying the already-quoted inscription, and ordering his heirs to send for another should the first stone fail to arrive. He was to be buried beside his grandfather at Arlington, his Eastern Shore family home, and the executors were to be certain that his body really got there and that they were not burying “a sham coffin.”

  When Daniel Parke married Martha Dandridge, his father was soon unhappy. He thought it a poor match and disliked the girl’s father, and, characteristically, Custis put such life into his passion that it outlived him. Before his death Anne Moody had been given a number of pieces of the Custis family plate and pewter, and she openly displayed them in the public room of her husband’s tavern. Daniel Parke and Martha subsequently went to court to get them back, and the incomplete record of the resulting lawsuit throws fascinating light into the shadows. Mrs. Moody testified that she had been given the plate because John Custis did not want it to fall into the hands of “any Dandridge’s daughter.” She revealed, too, that Custis had given her numerous other gifts including a pair of gold shoe buckles engraved “In Memory of John Custis Esqr.” She was, of course, the same Anne Moody who had inherited the portrait of “John otherwise called Jack” and an endowment of £20 for life. What, one might wonder, was the relationship between the powerful John Custis and the tavern keeper’s wife?

  It is not known how much time Daniel and Martha Custis spent at the Williamsburg house, but it seems to have been used only occasionally. Who, then, was looking after Jack? It was not a question that had to concern anyone for very long. The diary of John Blair of Williamsburg contained the following entry for September 19, 1751:

  abt 1 or 2 in ye morng. Col. Custis’s Favourite Boy Jack died in abt 21 hours illness being taken ill a little before day the 18th wth a Pain in the back of his Neck for wch he was blooded.7

  As quickly as Jack was rid of his pain in the neck, Daniel and Martha were relieved of theirs. So convenient a death should have been enough to make any coroner suspicious and to send even the most dim-witted detective reaching for his quizzing glass, but under the circumstances it is hardly likely that Daniel Parke Custis’s peers had anything but unquestioning compassion for the nice young couple who, by the Grace of God, had been relieved of an intolerable burden. There is, in fact, a convincing medical explanation for Jack’s sudden death. His neck pain may have been a symptom of meningitis, and if the boy was also suffering from sickle-cell anemia, bleeding could easily have killed him.

  Daniel Parke Custis died in 1757 leaving Martha in control of the entire Custis estate, transforming her, at the age of twenty-six, into the wealthiest and most desirable widow in Virginia. So, when George Washington married her two years later, he was on to a very good thing. As befits the memory of the wife of the Father of the Nation, Martha is usually described in terms that would do justice to a White House press secretary. She exuded an “infectious gentleness,” we are told; she possessed superlative tact and had beautiful teeth; she called herself “a fine, healthy girl,” and only an oaf would confuse her agreeable plumpness with fat. In the face of all this charm, it is a little surprising to find her, in 1757, selling off the Custis possessions—even to the family’s pictures (more than 135 of them) and items that had been in Custis homes since the days of John the Emigrant. Although these heirlooms may have meant nothing to her, they nonetheless were the lineal inheritance of her two surviving children. It might be construed, therefore, that in stripping the Williamsburg house, Martha was deliberately eradicating the memory of John Custis—though not, of course, the Custis estate, which was worth in excess of £23,500. Then, after remarrying, and in a move of almost Ashmolean irony, she rented his house and precious garden to another Dandridge, her brother Bartholomew.

  If, indeed, Martha was trying to be rid of John Custis, the presence of so many of his wine bottles at the bottom of the well makes a good deal of sense. Consequently, whenever I hear Martha Washington’s virtues extolled, I am reminded of the bottle with its Custis seal defaced and wonder whether the damage could have been the work of a gentle, pleasantly plump young lady who hid her beautiful teeth behind a tight-lipped angry mouth as she ground away at the name and memory of the man who had described her as “much inferior to his son.”

  As one reads the lengthy inventory of the Custis goods auctioned off on Martha’s instructions, and sees the relatively modest prices that they fetched, one wonders what became of them and what they might be worth today. Unlike his bottles, few of John Custis’s possessions would have borne his name, and once absorbed into another household they would have become nothing more than second-hand furniture and used pots and pans. Not knowing that a hundred years later these things could be promoted as precious relics from the family of the first First Lady, the buyers could have had no reason to be seeking memorials to the cantankerous eccentric whose relationship with Mrs. Moody and his flaunting of “Negro Jack” must have been an embarrassment to Williamsburg society.

  The bottle salvaged from the cellar of the House of the Six Chimneys in 1810 is the only relic of John Custis known to have remained there throughout the history of the home, and how it escaped Martha’s 1759 clearance and survived later tenancies and ownerships will never be known, but like William Long’s Rose Tavern bottle, it must have been privy to some extraordinary goings-on. It has seen the comings and goings of botanists and naturalists like John Bartram and Mark Catesby, and the visits of great Virginians such as William Byrd, James Blair and, of course, George Washington. It may have been touched by Anne Moody and have known the truth about the luckless Jack.

  The contents of the Custis well showed that his cellar had contained many other bottles having no identifying seals, and if nineteenth-century collectors had carried those off, there might now be no knowing (and certainly no proof) that they came from the cellar and are just as historically evocative as the 1713 example. Indeed, it is possible that were it not for the silver label identifying the source of that bottle, it might never have returned from its last home in Philadelphia to the safety of the Colonial Williamsburg collection. Although I am not suggesting that every bottle collector should have the source of each specimen engraved in silver on its side, there is much to be said for keeping a careful record of everything he knows about it.

  Sometimes, of course, the sellers find it to their advantage to pretend ignorance of the origins of their wares. Thus, for example, the sudden arrival on the American market of hundreds of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dutch wine bottles found on colonial sites in Surinam and the Guianas prompted some traders to label them English and to display them on the same shelves as others bought in Britain. Until 1971 little or nothing was known about Dutch bottles, except that most of them were not appreciably different from their English counterparts. Nobody in the Netherlands had paid much attention to them, and apart from the few picked up along the Florida Keys very few were seen in the United States. Then, with the sudden influx from South America, the picture changed. Sold singly and in groups to East Coast dealers, museums, and collectors, they brought prices that had at first run as high as $125 for examples from the second quarter of the eighteenth century, then
had fallen a year later to as little as $20. At the same time a nervousness developed about the value of eighteenth-century bottles in general, discouraging investment in even the normally desirable English specimens. Meanwhile, another collector in the West Indies was busily buying up more eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dutch bottles in South America with a view to injecting them into the American market after the first wave had been absorbed and prices recovered.

  As soon as magazines and antiquarian journals began to discuss Dutch bottles and to describe their identifiable characteristics, uncertainty among both dealers and collectors would be replaced by a new expertise making them desirable antiques. Then, as the supply dwindled, prices would rise again. That this does happen was brought home to me when, some years ago, I published an article on French faïence from Rouen imported into America during the Revolution. Comparable pieces which I had previously been able to pick up for less than $10 were subsequently offered to me for as much as $200—an excellent argument for keeping quiet!

  The illustrated group of Dutch bottles (Fig. 86) shows their basic evolution through the eighteenth century. Those of the first half are generally thinner than are the British, are more olive green in color, and possess more conical basal kicks and mouths with distinctive W-sectioned string-rims (Fig. 87). Later in the century, straight-walled cylindrical bodies in association with curiously elongated and bulbous necks were common. Molded, square-sectioned bottles have long been recognized as Dutch and loosely classified as being for gin, though they were actually used for a variety of liquors from rum to claret. Bottles of this type were made both in Europe and in England in the first half of the seventeenth century and were often closed with pewter caps rather than corks, but by the eighteenth century they do seem to have been predominantly Dutch—and corked. They were transported and stored in partitioned boxes known as cellars and are usually described as “case bottles” by those who flinch from associating them only with gin. The bottoms of the molds used in shaping the bodies were often crudely decorated with crosses, stars, rosettes, and anchors, and occasionally with initials, any of which would thus be embossed on the bases of the bottles. Similar mold marks are occasionally found on the bases of the later eighteenth-century cylindrical Dutch wine bottles, and it is to be expected that these will eventually be sought as desirable anomalies.

  86. A group of Dutch wine and gin bottles found in Guyana, South America. From left to right these examples are tentatively attributed to about 1730, 1770, 1750, 1790, and the mid-nineteenth century. The tall-necked specimen measures 11 inches and has a molded anchor on its base.

  87. Comparative mouth and string-rim shapes for British (1–12), and Dutch wine bottles. Alas, like most simplistic criteria, there are enough exceptions to obscure the rule.

  The Dutch and Anglo-Dutch colonial sites in South America are not the only rich sources of bottles still available to the adventurous collector or entrepreneur. Although the West Indian islands that are easily reached have either been fairly thoroughly milked or have been put off limits by prudent government conservation controls, there are no doubt others that will remain productive for some time to come. Virtually untouched, however, are India and the continent of Africa, both of which received tremendous quantities of bottles through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In addition, there are the globe-spattered dots on the map, minute island outposts of empire where bottled palliatives were the only solace. One of them, the thirty-eight-square-mile Ascension Island in the south Atlantic, which was uninhabited until Napoleon was imprisoned on neighboring St. Helena in 1815, has begun to see its bottle assets emigrating to America. The two specimens illustrated in Figure 88 are typical of British bottles of the mid-nineteenth century. Both were shaped in molds, that on the left having the word PATENT embossed on the shoulder and P.R.BBISTOL on the bottom, the latter identifying it as a product of Powell and Ricketts of Bristol, a partnership established in 1856. The factory had earlier traded under the name of Henry Ricketts & Co., and in 1823 had secured the first patent for manufacturing liquor bottles in molds that shaped not only the body but also the shoulders and neck. All bottles made by this process can be identified by the mold marks encircling the shoulders and thence extending vertically to the string-rim.

  88. Empty bottles are invariably the legacy of Western culture. These were found on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic. Left, a light-repelling “black” bottle commonly used for beer in the mid-nineteenth century, and right, a much thinner pale green specimen made under the Ricketts Patent of 1823 but dating no earlier than 1856. Height of the latter 11¼ inches.

  The other Ascension Island bottle possesses the mold marks, but they are less pronounced, due in part to the density of the glass. It was this kind of bottle that was meant when hostile London crowds shouted “Black bottle!” at the Seventh Earl of Cardigan (later of Crimean War fame) following an 1840 incident in the officers’ mess of the 11th Hussars. Cardigan had censured a junior officer for bringing a common black bottle into the mess in the belief that it contained porter. Although the culprit, Captain Reynolds, assured his commanding officer that the bottle held Moselle, Cardigan retorted that a gentleman decanted his wine and ordered Reynolds expelled from the mess. The black bottles commonly did contain porter, a dark and bitter beer deriving its name from “porters’ beer” normally drunk by laborers. Belonging to the same class is the example to the right of Figure 89 which was made for the use of the common room at All Souls College at Oxford. Dating from the 1830s, it is one of the most recent bottles to be marked with an applied seal. The shape is in distinct contrast to that of its companion, made for the same Oxford college about seventy years earlier. Both originally held wine, for as Captain Reynolds had the misfortune to prove, British bottles of the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century were not made in different shapes to distinguish between types of wine or between wine and porters’ beer.

  89. English wine bottles made for the common room of All Souls College, Oxford. Left, free-blown in about 1760, and right, mold-blown and dating from about 1820, its height 10¾ inches.

  It is dangerously easy to generalize out of truth, and in the last paragraph I may have been guilty of doing just that. Although I have yet to see a nineteenth-century British bottle bearing a seal dated later than 1837, it does not follow that sealed bottles (without dates) were not made after the 1830s. Dutch and French sealed bottles were common through much of the century, and I have seen a French olive oil bottle with a seal dated 1910. Then again there are the commemorative anomalies like those made to honor the coronation of George VI in 1937, and, most recently, a gross reproduction of an early eighteenth-century shape (Fig. 29) with a 1972 seal commemorating the silver wedding of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. I would be doing a further disservice were it to be supposed that no wine bottles were made in molds prior to the Ricketts patent of 1823. Both square and cylindrical glass wine bottles were widely used during the Roman centuries, and, as I have already noted, case bottles were shaped in the same way in the seventeenth century. Even the early globular wine bottles were partially shaped in a mold to ensure that the bubble was of the right size for the bottle’s intended capacity; then, by the mid-eighteenth century the body was allowed to remain long enough in the mold to hold the shape, and by 1792 London glass-sellers were selling quart bottles specifically identified in their invoices as “moulded” bottles. There are earlier references to molds, such as the 1752 newspaper announcement of the theft of “one Brass Bottle-Mould,” though it is possible that the mold was intended for shaping patent medicine phials rather than common green wine bottles.8

  Patent medicine bottles are becoming as collectable as wine bottles and are a lot easier to store. Unlike the free-blown green phials of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, others dating from the 1720s onward were of clear or “white” glass, essentially rectangular in section and blown into two-piece brass molds that opened diagonally so that the marks ran up opposite corners of the
bottles. The oldest dated example yet recorded was found at Wetherburn’s Tavern in Williamsburg, but was made in England to contain Robert Turlington’s Balsam of Life and is embossed with the date March 25, 1750. Four years later Turlington began using a new bottle designed to prevent, so he said, “the villainy of some persons, who buying up my empty bottles, have basely and wickedly put therein a vile spurious counterfeit sort.”9 Ironically, the new bottles became the most widely pirated and copied of any used for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century patent medicines and were reproduced in both England and America where the magic ingredients (twenty-six of them) of Turlington’s Balsam were considered a universal cure-all (Fig. 90). Although there were numerous other patent medicines in the eighteenth century, and advertisements indicate that they were dispensed in characteristic bottles, few are known, and it seems likely that the identifying features were fancy labels and impressed wax seals over the mouths. If this was so, then it is probable that the elixirs and potions, purgatives and carminatives, were usually sold in bottles and phials like those shown in Figure 91. They are, incidentally, part of a collection of forty (most of them having faded paper labels bearing London street names) that turned up in a shop specializing in ethnography and Egyptian antiquities!

  90. Pirated versions of Robert Turlington’s bottles originally designed for his Balsam of Life in 1754. All were found in Williamsburg, Virginia. The left example may have been made in the latter part of the eighteenth century, but the others date from the first half of the nineteenth century though they were not discarded until 1856. The right specimen is 29/16 inches in height and is pale blue in color; the others are clear.