This candlestick was owned in the Copp family home in Stonington, Connecticut during the 18th and 19th century. The oval candlestick has an oval, single-reeded, removable nozzle with rolled edge and flared candle cup or socket atop a plain, single-seamed stem with single bead at top and molded band at bottom above the oval, trumpet-shaped, molded base with grooved border.
The Copp Collection contains a variety of household objects that the Copp family of Connecticut used from around 1700 until the mid-1800s. Part of the Puritan Great Migration from England to Boston, the family eventually made their home in New London County, Connecticut, where their textiles, clothes, utensils, ceramics, books, bibles, and letters provide a vivid picture of daily life. More of the collection from the Division of Home and Community Life can be viewed by searching accession number 28810.
Quarter-circle pan with flat, curved front edge and two, wire-rimmed, straight sides that is attached to a long, straight, metal-wrapped, looped wire handle on back of one side with two rivets. Pan is made from one piece, cut and folded into shape; no solder visible. No marks.
This candlestick was owned in the Copp family home in Stonington, Connecticut during the 18th and 19th century. The oval candlestick has an oval, single-reeded, removable nozzle with rolled edge and flared candle cup or socket atop a plain, single-seamed stem with single bead at top and molded band at bottom above the oval, trumpet-shaped, molded base with grooved border.
The Copp Collection contains a variety of household objects that the Copp family of Connecticut used from around 1700 until the mid-1800s. Part of the Puritan Great Migration from England to Boston, the family eventually made their home in New London County, Connecticut, where their textiles, clothes, utensils, ceramics, books, bibles, and letters provide a vivid picture of daily life. More of the collection from the Division of Home and Community Life can be viewed by searching accession number 28810.
Americans of the post-World War II era were not wine drinkers. In the 1950’s, wine consumption was generally confined either to a few well-traveled people near each coast who associated wine with fine dining, both customarily French, or to members of ethnic communities who had long drunk both homemade and imported wines with foods common to their community. Infrequent wine consumers often drank “Chianti” at inexpensive Italian-American restaurants where they consumed their spaghetti and lasagna with wine from familiar straw covered green bottles (fiaschi) placed on the red checked tablecloths. The same bottles, once emptied, served as candleholders and decorative touches in these neighborhood gathering places, and these same straw-covered bottles of Italian wine were often among the few wines available at liquor stores throughout the country.
Students, communards, beatniks, and Italian-American restaurant goers alike used the emptied Chianti bottles, with their peasant straw fiaschi, from the 1950’s through the 1980’s, both as cheap drink, lighting, and decoration until the availability of better quality American and European wines changed their drinking habits.. In 2012, the little straw covered Chianti bottles, with their residue from the many hours of candlewax dripped down their sides, are available in second hand stores and online purchasing centers for those who keep a sentimental attachment to the decorative markers of their youth.
This particular bottle, date 1950, was purchased on e-Bay by just such a sentimentalist, a museum curator who remembered long hours spent in the 1960’s reading poetry with friends, discussing politics, and drinking cheap wine from bottles such as this one.