Personal Items and Activities of the Col. Paul Wentworth House
I am Renata Boulay, a recent graduate of Gordon College in History, with a concentration in Public History and Museum Studies. I have an interest in pursuing further studies in archaeology, and this summer I was able to hone my skills by working on the excavation of the Colonel Paul and Abra Wentworth House under the guidance of Dr. Tad Baker and Dr. Alix Martin. I also participated in the post-excavation lab school at Strawbery Banke, cataloging artifacts and developing this research.
Among the great assortment of artifacts recovered this season from the Wentworth house were a grouping of artifacts labelled as “Personal Items”. These items, ranging from buttons to cutlery to perfume stoppers and gun flint, demonstrate the variety of life and activity at the Wentworth site.
I was interested in the array of activities represented in the "personal" artifact class, and what they could tell us about the residents of the Wentworth house. I chose a few types of artifacts to highlight, namely: slates, marbles, and pipes. Each item represents a different facet of life, and a demographic - children would be taught to read and write using the slate pencils and tablets recovered, and would use their free time to play games such as marbles. It is also worth noting that enslaved people, especially children, would also make and use clay marbles for games and entertainment (Garrett, 2023.), and comparing the characteristics of the marbles recovered as well as where they were discovered, there is a possibility that some of the clay marbles found could have belonged to the enslaved people we know resided there.
Many marbles commonly found in colonial sites are clay, simple yet effective toys for the children of the day. However, the Wentworth family, being quite affluent, could have afforded to buy imported colorful glass marbles, available from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Read more on marbles in archaeology sites here: https://historicjamestowne.org/collections/artifacts/marbles/.
The largest group of items within the personal category is clay pipe fragments. English clay tobacco pipes were the height of practicality, spanning the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, used by every class of person, and discarded frequently due to their cheap, fragile nature. (Hume, 296.) For the historical archaeologist, pipes are incredibly useful for dating a site because pipe forms evolved rapidly, and despite their disposable nature, pipes often bore maker's marks or distinct features that can tell us roughly when and/or where they were made.
Our excavations this year and last year produced a sizeable amount of pipe fragments, including stems of differing size and bowls of differing shape and pattern. Figure 4 features a pipe stem with the maker's mark stamp reading "Glasgow", the city where it was manufactured. The other side of the pipe stem reveals the manufacturer's name, one "W. White" (William White), a prominent Glasgow pipe maker of the early nineteenth century. Figure 5 demonstrates two varying bowl patterns: the left with a ribbed design and the right with a floral pattern. Included among the unique pipe finds was a brown lead-glazed pipe stem (visible in Fig. 7) and a bowl piece (probably accidentally) imprinted with the fingerprint of the pipe maker. To make sense of the variety of pieces, I compiled data based on all the pipe fragments excavated from the Wentworth house to date.
The most prominent method for determining the approximate date of the pipe is the measuring of the bore hole, a practice developed by Mr. J.C. Harrington of the National Park Service in 1954 (Hume, 297.) The size of the hole correlates to the decades in which it was likely produced, as the pipes became longer and thinner over time, and thus the bore holes became smaller.
Chart of Pipe
Stems Dated from the Col. Paul and Abra Wentworth House 2025-26
This chart
uses the Harrington gauge system to measure the internal bore diameter of all
the pipe stems recovered from the Col. Wentworth house. Read more on colonial pipe
dating methods here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344958959_McMillan_2016_An_Evaluation_of_Tobacco_Pipe_Stem_Dating_Formulas.
After measuring and charting all the pipe stem fragments from the Wentworth House, I then utilized ArcGIS mapping software to create a geometric interval distribution map - showing the concentrations of both personal items and specifically pipe stems throughout the site.
This charted data (Fig. 8), paired with the distribution maps, is useful to visualize the temporal and locational activity around the Wentworth house.
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