Pass the Salt, Will Ya?

Behold the lowly salt and pepper shakers:  always there when you need them, and often in a decorative or entertaining shape.  Did you know that the salt shaker got its big start in 1911 after the Morton Salt company introduced an anti-caking agent (magnesium carbonate), which allowed the salt to flow freely out of a container?  Shakers received a second boost a decade later when, during the Depression, ceramics companies were looking for inexpensive items to sell, and decided that salt and pepper shakers were an item all homes needed and could afford.  Then came the 1950s and the American automobile culture, and the travel industry began offering shakers as souvenirs. 

 

 

Now, some folks call these dispensers “salt cellars,” but that’s not really right:  a “cellar” is a dish or a box that holds the salt, and with these devices, you use your fingers or a tiny spoon to serve the salt onto your food.  Of course, salt was purchased in block, or rock form in those days, and you had to chip it off and crush or grind it yourself.  Some early salt shakers were actually salt mills, used to grind the chunks, much as we see today. 

 

And long ago (in the latter half of the 1800s), shakers might have been called “spice box, dredge box, salt bottle, or condiment box” (from “All Shook Up – The History of the Salt Shaker” on the blog Pinch, Shake and Grind).  And like pretty much every object, the more ornate your shakers are, the more wealthy you are deemed to be.  The commoners had salt dishes and shakers made of pewter, horn, or wood, while the upper classes used ones crafted of silver.  King Charles I of England noted in his diary in 1625 that he saw a “salt made of gold, weighing 150 ounces and studded with sapphires, rubies, pearls and emeralds” (ibid).

If you would like to see a whole lot of shakers in one place, go down to Gatlinburg where you will find the Museum of Salt and Pepper Shakers!  There, Andrea and Rolf Ludden have on display their collection of over 20,000 shakers.  And they have 20,000 more in a sister museum in Guadalest, Spain!  How would such a thing get started?  Well, according to the museum website, Andrea was looking for a good pepper mill, but couldn’t seem to find one that worked well, so as she would acquire one and subsequently discard it, she’d set it on a windowsill, along with a few salt shakers that were decorative.  People thought she had a collection, so they started giving shakers to her.  Then her kids started to scour flea markets for them, and the collection grew.  And since Andrea is an archaeologist, she became fascinated with the cultural aspect of the designs, and decided that a museum was in order so others could learn and enjoy.

 

According to an article in Smithsonian Magazine, if you have a set that’s labeled “Made in occupied Japan,” you have something rare, as World War II nearly halted production of consumer ceramics there, displacing Japan as the number-one producer of shakers in the world during the 1920s through the 1940s (see Smithsonian.com, January 23, 2012 article).

And what is the most-collected shaker set in the world?  The Hummel figures, made by the renowned German pottery maker Goebel.  Their Hummel shakers were introduced in 1935.

So pass the salt, will ya?

Vintage Anagrams Game

Today’s treasure is an old Parker Brothers game titled “The Games of Letters and Anagrams on Wooden Blocks” that I found during a recent round of the antique stores here in Knoxville. The Wikipedia entry on Anagrams says this game was first published in the late 1890’s, and The Strong museum in Rochester, New York shows a box having a lid identical to mine in their National Museum of Play, and they date the game to 1890. My game’s box is in remarkably good shape for its age, with the box bottom totally intact and just one side of the lid separated at the corners. The box sports a price tag on the bottom that says “Joseph Horne Co., Pittsburgh, PA, $1.00.”

This game, as were all of the Parker Brothers games until 1991, was manufactured in Salem, Massachusetts. The company Parker Brothers was founded by George S. Parker (1866-1952, who created his first game in 1883, at the age of 16. He and his older brother Charles were playing a game called Everlasting, which was designed to teach young ‘uns good morals, and they were bored with the game and tired of “being preached at,” so George modified the game to make the objective to become the richest player, and instituted the concepts of borrowing from a bank, partnerships, and profit-sharing. As the game matured, he called it “Banking,” and it became so popular with his friends and family that he unsuccessfully tried to interest two Boston publishers to produce it. Undeterred, George spent $40 of his paper route earning to publish 500 sets, eventually selling all but twelve, netting a profit of $100!

Of course, George went on to found a game company, first called the George S. Parker Company, in 1883, and later renaming it to Parker Brothers in 1888 when Charles joined the business, followed by a third brother, Edward H. in 1898. George was the guiding light of the company, generally conceiving of the game ideas and writing the rules for them. His philosophy was that games should be played for enjoyment – not for the improvement of one’s morals and values. Word-making games were very popular in the latter part of the 19th century, and the game concepts were eventually merged with the crossword puzzle format by Alfred Butts in the 1930s to create the game Scrabble™. While my set is missing the instructions, the principle of the game is to create as many words as possible from letters you draw from the pool. The words are not connected to either other words made by you or made by others, in contrast to Scrabble™. Once you’ve presented a word, others can “steal” it by using all of the letters in your word to create a new word, thus increasing their number of completed words.

Does anyone recall having played this game? Maybe you have a set in the attic!

The Poky Little Puppy

If you were to guess which children’s books hold the top slots for all-time sales, which would you pick? Perhaps The Tales of Peter Rabbit, or Green Eggs and Ham? While both of those have been big hits through the years, they are not the best-selling children’s book of all time – that honor goes to The Poky Little Puppy!

Published in 1942, The Poky Little Puppy was one of twelve books released by Simon and Schuster in their series Little Golden Books. The books initially sold for 25 cents, at a time when children’s books normally sold for $2-3. The premise was to provide “a colorful children’s book that was durable and affordable for most American families.” The books were also sold in department stores – a new concept in selling that further enabled access to the books to all. Even today, the books can be purchased for $2.99! In 2001, Random House acquired the Golden Books line for 85 million dollars. There are now more than 600 books in the series.

The Poky Little Puppy was written by Janette Sebring Lowrey, a Texas native (1892-1984). She wrote dozens of books for children and young readers from the 1930s through the 1970s. The book was illustrated by a Swedish artist, Gustaf Tenggren. Tenggren worked for Simon and Schuster for twenty years, producing 25 books, many of which also sold millions of copies. Many of these books carried the prefix "Tenggren's" before the title as a kind of quality mark; a warranty that the tale was interpreted by an authority in the area of illustration. Despite the success of these books, neither Sebring nor Tenggren is well-known to the general public for their work.

The quilt shown here was made for my sister Pam’s birthday last year. It’s my first try at using prairie points for the edging – my verdict is that they are tedious, but add a nice border to the quilt!

The Convict Hulk Success

An eBay item I bid on but did not win was a pamphlet advertising the tour of the Success, which was billed as “the last of England’s infamous felon fleet.” As is often the case, a little digging reveals an interesting story!

Captain James Cook was the first Englishman to suggest colonization of the newly discovered land of Australia, in 1770. In May of 1787, this idea came to fruition, although in a way that Cook may not have intended: two warships, six transport ships, and three supply ships set sail for Australia for the purpose of establishing a penal colony. The six transport ships carried 568 male convicts and 191 female convicts, along with their military escort of 191 Marines and 19 Officers. The fleet arrived in Botany Bay in January of the following year, eventually moving on to Port Jackson and establishing the colony there.

Thus began a period of some 60 years of transporting convicts to Australia, until 1850. During that period, more than 162,000 convicts were relocated to the continent. As can be imagined, this required a flotilla of ships, numbering over 800, however, the ship Success was not one of them!


The Success was built in 1840 in Burma for the East Indian trading firm of Cockerell and Co., for the purpose of trade between the Orient and England. She had a length of 135 feet, a beam of 30 feet, and weighed 622 tons net. After some voyages for that purpose, her owners turned her to the task of carrying families emigrating to Australia, which she began doing in 1843. After her third such voyage in 1852, she was abandoned by her crew, who succumbed to “gold fever” and left sailing to try their hands in the gold fields of Victoria.

The ship was then sold to the Victorian government, which wanted to use the Success as a “prison hulk,” or a floating prison. This was the ship’s fate from 1860 until 1869; first as a women’s prison, and later as sleeping quarters for a boys’ reformatory, until the Australian government discontinued the use of vessels for detention, due to the inhumanity of the practice. After a stint as a warehouse for storing powder and ammunition, the Success was sold to a UK company, after which her whereabouts are uncertain for a period of time.

In 1891, the ship was made into a floating “convict ship” museum, with a wax museum and exhibits depicting the terrible conditions of the convict transports, along with exhibits of torture devices, presumably for the purpose of increasing attendance. A man named Harry Power was the tour guide on these port-to-port stops; this is notable because Mr. Power was a resident on the Success as a convicted felon at one point! His career as tour guide was ill-fated, however, as he drowned on a fishing trip later that year.

The Success did not fare any better, as she was not successful as a maritime museum, and was scuttled at her moorings in 1892. She was sold to a new owner and refloated the following year, again working as the museum ship, touring the Australia ports. In 1895, she went abroad, touring Great Britain ports to great crowds until 1910, when she was sold to American Captain D. H. Smith.

On April 10, 1912, she sailed from Liverpool toward the U.S.—the same day that the Titanic left her port on her final voyage. Tens of millions of visitors toured the Success from 1912 until the early 1940s, including her last tour on the Great Lakes beginning in 1923 (she was featured at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933).

Unfortunately, many of the exhibits and pamphlets and postcards used to promote the museum were based on exaggerations and sometimes outright falsehoods. One particularly durable inaccuracy was the claim that the Success was a convict transport ship, when, in fact, she never served in that capacity. Another was the exploitation of the “Kelly Gang,” who were notorious Australian outlaws, but had no connection to the ship other than the fact that one of the gang’s father emigrated on the ship. In other editions of the pamphlets, the gang’s ringleader was supposedly the one who arrived on the Success, and manufactured arguments and trials were also published. The amount and persuasiveness of the inaccuracies were so great that in 1934, the Commonwealth of Australia instructed its own Attorney General to investigate the claims and set the record straight. A great website about the ship that contains the Australian A.G. report is http://www.ohioshipwrecks.org/ShipwreckDetail.php?AR=1&Wreck=15.


During the period of 1925-1943, while the Success toured the Great Lakes ports, a schoolteacher named Harry Van Stack was a frequent lecturer on the ship’s history and on the role of convict ships. By 1933, the Success had found a permanent home in Cleveland. When Mr. Van Stack relocated to Sandusky, he worked to have the ship towed there, as she had experienced a period of neglect and was showing her age. In 1945, her final owner, Walter Kolbe, had her towed to Port Clinton, where she was to be restored and permanently docked near the Erie Islands. However, this journey was the last for the Success. She ran aground near Port Clinton while under tow, and after the autumn storms in Lake Erie and the winter ice, she was not in good shape. On July 4, 1946, vandals burned the ship to the waterline while berthed at the Lake Erie Pier.


Mr. Van Stack’s final legacy regarding the Success was a generous and lasting one. He donated his entire collection of documents to the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio. The collection includes early English penal documents, correspondence, news clippings, advertisements, brochures, postcards, and posters relating to the Success. The bulk of the material dates from 1925 to 1943, although some documents date to 1779. Additional documents are located in the National Library of Australia.

To Comment

I have set up a dummy account that everyone can use to post comments, if you don't want to create your own Google account. Just use the login name of: marshablog@comcast.net and the password of: marshabl

Or you can post a comment on my facebook page. Or you can do nothing at all....

I look forward to hearing from you! (Or not!)

USS DOVER

I LOVE e-Bay! Really! I mean, how else could someone in Tennessee find, and purchase, a pitcher that had been aboard the USS Dover, a gunboat used in the 1940s? The pitcher measures about 5 inches tall, and is 3 inches in diameter at its base. The words “U. S. DOVER 1942” are embossed on its front, and it has a number of tiny little holes rusted through on its face and where the bottom meets the front side (it wouldn’t hold any liquid anymore!).



Of course, this all just piqued my interest about where all this little pitcher might have been, so I started digging. Turns out, the Dover didn’t start out with that name (not too unusual for ships). She was actually built in 1894 by the Newport News Shipbuilding Company, in Newport News, Virginia, and was commissioned on May 13, 1897 as the USS Wilmington, Gunboat No. 8.

The Wilmington measured 251’ 10” in length, she had a beam of 40’ 2”, a displacement of 1,571 tons, and a draft of 9’. She was equipped with eight four-inch gun mounts and four “three-pounders” (guns that were capable of firing three-pound shells). As her name befits, she was of the Wilmington class, although I was unable to find any information about this class. She was the 8th boat built by the shipbuilding company.

Post card showing USS Wilmington (PG-8), date and place unknown. Courtesy Darryl Baker.

She saw her first action during the Spanish-American War, in July of 1898, off the coast of Cuba. Just days into action, her crew learned of a communications cable connecting Santa Cruz del sur, Cuba with Jucaro on the Cuban island Isla de la Juventud to the west, and proceeding to that location, used a grappling hook to find and cut the cable.

Following the war, the Wilmington saw service in the South Atlantic Squadron, where she sailed to ports such as San Juan, Puerto Rico; Port-of-Spain, Trinidad; Venezuela; Georgetown, British Guiana; and Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana. In March 1899, she sailed up the Amazon River during the rainy season, arriving in Iquitos, Peru in April, where her crew was presented with three monkeys and a tiger cat by the Peruvians.

Leaving Peru, she sailed south to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Montevideo, Uruguay, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. During this run, she had trouble with the propeller shaft, which ultimately resulted in a drydock stay in Buenos Aires for some months.

After the shaft was repaired, she commenced on a tour of the Far East, culminating in her decommissioning in the Philippines on June 30, 1904. She was recommissioned two years later, and served off the China coast and other Asian ports of call until the start of World War I. Her duties during the war were concentrated on patrol duty in the Philippine Islands and China. After the war, she continued to tour in Asia until 1922, when she returned to Portsmouth, New Hampshire’s Navy Yard.

In July 1923, she joined the US Navy Reserve Force, 9th Naval District for the states of Ohio and Kentucky. She was stationed in Toledo and used as a training ship on Lake Erie, becoming inactive in the fall of that year, and later serving as a training ship for reservists.



USS Wilmington (PG-8) circa the 1930s or 1940s, steaming on the Great Lakes. Courtesy the Historical Collections of the Great Lakes.

On January 27, 1941, the ship was renamed Dover in preparation for her entry into World War II. In late 1942, she sailed to Quebec, where she was fitted with a 5-inch gun. She operated for some time in the northeast, then sailed to the gulf coast in January 1943. She was reassigned to the 8th Naval District in New Orleans, and served as an armed guard training ship throughout the remainder of the war.


USS Wilmington (PG-8) circa 1942 as the USS Dover (IX-30). Courtesy E. C. Lowrance, Jr.

On December 20, 1945, she was decommissioned, and was sold for scrap on December 30, 1946.

In March 1950, a small news article appeared in the Camden (New Jersey) Courier-Post:



U.S. Census records show that Mr. Warrington was a member of the USS Wilmington’s crew in 1900; he was most likely on the ship during the entire South American tour, from 1897 through 1901. Mr. Warrington was born in 1870, and was a career Navy man, with a final rank of Chief Master at Arms.

He returned to Camden in 1920, and lived with his mother until she passed away, Although he had married in 1916, his wife apparently died shortly after, as he was listed as a widower in the 1920 census. Mr. Warrington was buried at the Beverly National Cemetery on March 27, 1950.

So somewhere belowdecks in the photo above, my pitcher was sitting on a table in the mess hall, perhaps having just been in the hands of Chief Master at Arms Warrington!

The Schooner Fame

I recently visited the lovely harbor town Salem, Massachusetts, and during my stay, went sailing on the two-masted schooner Fame. The current ship is a replica of an 1812-era schooner that was converted from a fishing boat to one whose purpose was to capture booty from the British merchant ships – a privateer!

What distinguishes a “schooner” from other types of ships? For a ship to be classified as a schooner, it must have at least two masts (the Thomas W. Lawson had seven!), the fore mast must be shorter than the aft mast, the main sail is rigged to the aft mast, and both sails are both fore- and aft-rigged, so that they run parallel with the line of the keel.

A design originating in the early 1700’s, the first schooners were built in nearby Gloucester (just 30 miles to the east of Salem). The design promoted speed and maneuverability. Besides privateering, other activities for which the schooner’s sleek design was well-suited were transporting slaves for trade, ocean fishing, and blockade running.

A “privateer” is a privately owned merchant, or commercial, ship that is converted by a government for the purpose of engaging in naval warfare. Before national navies existed, or were large enough to be effective, privateers fulfilled that function. For the United States, the War of 1812 with Great Britain coincided with the vast manufacture of schooners, thus that time period made great use of schooners in the war effort.

The Fame was one such ship. Soon after her construction, she was purchased by a consortium of twenty-five Salem mariners, for the purpose of engaging in privateering. The sailors refitted her with two small cannon and selected a Mr. William Webb, a veteran sailor, as their captain. When their privateering commision arrived from the U.S. Government on July 1, 1812, they set sail, with the goal of capturing British ships and their cargoes.

The first destination were the small ports along the coasts of Maine and New Brunswick. British ships typically loaded raw materials such as lumber, destined for the Royal Navy. And this proved to be a good choice, as they discovered two ships there: the Concord and the Elbe, both of which surrendered without the Fame crew firing a single shot! After the cargo of masts, spars, staves, lumber, and tar was sold at auction, the profit gained the owners nearly ten times the cost of the Fame.

Because this conquest was made so early in the war, many consider the Fame to be the first successful privateering ship in the War of 1812. The ship would continue its work until 1814, with eleven more sorties resulting in 20 captures, until she wrecked in the Bay of Fundy.

On the day that I sailed, the seas were calm – too calm. We had to run the motor to get us out into the bay, and only then were we able to hoist the sails. The Fame is an interactive ship – you can participate in sailing as much or as little as you choose. Of course, I’m all over everything: peppering the crew with questions and trying my hand at everything they’ll let me do.



Sailor Bernie and I had the task of raising the fore-side of both the fore- and aft-sails. Bernie handed me the thick rope and told me to “just pull ‘er up!” It was easy at first, but as the canvas unfurled, it was heavier and heavier, and for the last few pulls, I simply reached up on the rope as far as I could, and put all my weight into it to pull the sail up.

There were two small boys on board, and they had great fun helping Captain Jeremy steer, using the large, wooden rudder. Once we were well into Salem Harbor, Bernie loaded up a charge of black powder and fired the tiny cannon mounted to the port side.

I helped again when it was time to lower the sails; this was much easier, although you had to keep control of the rope as it slithered through your hands. Once the sails were down, I was assigned the task of flaking the rope out and coiling it up tidily for the next voyage. Just remember: “coil with the sun,” or clockwise. If you don’t, you’ll have a gnarly mess!

The replica Fame can be visited between Memorial Day through Halloween. She’s located on the Pickering Wharf Marina in downtown Salem. Be sure to ask the crew to show you the photo album of her construction. Local spruce and white oak was used, and construction continued year-round from February 2002 to July 4, 2003. She is not only an historic ship, but a beautiful one as well!