Ceramics for Slaves: Colonoware

Charleston Old Walled City Tours will offer the Slavery and Freedom Walking Tour Daily at 10:30 AM in the month of February, Black History Month. This two hour event covers less than a mile. Purchase Tickets Here: Book Now!



Colonoware vessel, Georgia ca 1750

Ceramics are often the primary find at archaeological digs. They are important in determining the economic status, food ways and eating habits of those that lived there.  In colonial digs here in Charleston, early porcelain shards from Germany and England are common, reflecting Charleston's status as the major seaport on the  eastern seaboard. Late colonial and antebellum digs reveal the Chinese Export porcelain so cherished and displayed today in the china cabinets of many an Old Charleston family. Occasionally, the alkaline glazed stoneware  produced in the upstate of South Carolina is to be found in post -1820 sites. These ceramics are thoroughly documented.

Mixed among the shards are another ceramic not so well documented , and it is dubbed  Colonoware. Colonoware is a hand coiled and pit fired pottery long produced as an inexpensive trade item by American Indians and sold or bartered in the city.  It is never found stashed in the back of barns, or at estate sales. It is never  found passed down as precious family heirlooms. It is commonly found at dig sites of 18th century pioneer settlements and at 18th and  19th century plantation communities. Normally found as broken shards, intact specimens are recovered from riverbeds. Since trade goods were transported by water, the occasional overturned boat provides intact specimens. The example below was recovered from the Savannah River.(see Figure 1 below). 

As Native Americans dispersed from the southeast, it appears that Colonoware production was taken up by plantation blacks to provide cooking and eating vessels. This is a practice most likely encouraged by plantation owners. It was, after all,  an inexpensive source of cooking and eating  ware that put elderly or substantially disabled individuals back to work. 

Typically, plantation slaves would have prepared food in a common pot. The food would have been transferred from the pot to a large wooden trough for serving and eating where it would be shared by all, or the food would be transferred into small bowls or pots, such as the colonoware bowl  here illustrated.

Figure 1.Colonoware Vessel

Classic cooking bowl form

Eighteenth century digs at plantation sites where the enslaves lived reveals little in the way of serving spoons or cutlery of any sort. Most white frontiersman were eating with wooden spoons, and this was probably the norm for the enslaved as well. Although the archaeological record is silen, we do know that they were not eating with metal implements. As pewter became available, it use was reserved initially for whites. Thus, for the first half of the eighteenth century many plantation slaves would have eaten without utensils, using shells or makeshift items. 

Some scholars suggest that Colonoware was folk craft handed down from Africa. There are certainly precedents. Similar coiled and low fired ware was produced in Africa, as it was in virtually all cultures. Indeed, more sophisticated high fired wares were produced in Africa and all over the world. Whatever its origin, we know that the Catawba Tribe was trading in Colonoware well into the nineteenth century, wares that were used on the plantation by slaves. Colonoware shards from the earliest sites reflect the aboriginal styles of the native Americans, but it was not long before the ware produced for sale took on the look of European vessels such as the one pictured above.

 In the short story “Loves of the Driver”, author William Gilmore Simms notes that during his boyhood in the 1810s that 

It was the custom of the Catawba Indians …to come down, at certain seasons, from their far homes in the interior, to the seaboard, bringing to Charleston a little stock of earthen pots and pans….which they bartered in the city. They did not, however, bring their pots and pans from the Nation, but descending to the Lowcountry empty handed, in groups or families, they squatted down on the rich clay lands of the Edisto and and there established themselves in a temporary abiding place, until their simple potteries had yielded them a sufficient supply of wares with which to throw themselves into the market.”

That colonoware was produced for the slave population can be inferred by the statement of Phillip Porcher, a St Stephens SC resident , recounting that :

“….the Catawba Indians ….traveled down from the upcountry to
Charleston, making clay ware for the negroes along the way. They would camp until a section was supplied and then move until finally Charleston was reached.”

Finally, Charley Watson, a former slave from Winnsboro, SC, in a WPA interview in 1935 recalling plantation days of the 1850s  said:

“De Indians fetch their pots and jars to sell”

Note that by this time , (1850s) exceptional high fired utilitarian stoneware was being produced and sold in the Winnsboro area. The stoneware, with a glassy alkaline glaze, was both durable and easy to clean. It was used for food production but also for serving as well, although fancy ware from Charleston was preferred at the dining table by country housewives who could afford it.  By this time tinsmiths were producing plates and cups in the upcountry and rail was bringing goods inland from the coast. Apparently, the use of these items were reserved for the white population, and colonoware use was reserved for the slave population.

Below are examples of contemporary Catawba Pottery. This is a highly collectible product that is different than the Colonoware produced for trade
.
Figure 2. Contemporary Catawba Ware

Contemporary Catawba Pottery

Because Colonoware was a low fired product it was delicate, not unlike porcelain.  But unlike porcelain, this porous and unglazed product  stained easily and would have retained flavors from previous  use.  It  would not have been uniformly sanitary after cleaning and would have been a breeding ground for microbes. It seems that its major advantage was low cost.  I suspect that, in its own way,it was a  symbol of repression. Colonoware was an inferior product, a fact perhaps not noted by the 18^th century enslaved population , but certainly by nineteenth century enslaved, observing the expansion of ceramic and tin options. As food preparation and serving vessels improved with the introduction of  tin and stoneware, colonoware continued as the Master's choice for the slave street.

This premise is proven by the distribution of Colonoware shards at dig sites all throughout the southeast from Florida to Alabama to Virginia. Shards are commonly found interspersed among other shards in archaeological digs. Present in both eighteenth and nineteenth century digs, it is far more predominant in earlier sites than later. It is interesting to note that it is virtually nonexistent at post civil war sites.

It would seem that freed African Americans in post civil war society left colonoware behind when allowed to choose their own vessels.