Natural Resources
The natural resources collections offer centuries of evidence about how Americans have used the bounty of the American continent and coastal waters. Artifacts related to flood control, dam construction, and irrigation illustrate the nation's attempts to manage the natural world. Oil-drilling, iron-mining, and steel-making artifacts show the connection between natural resources and industrial strength.
Forestry is represented by saws, axes, a smokejumper's suit, and many other objects. Hooks, nets, and other gear from New England fisheries of the late 1800s are among the fishing artifacts, as well as more recent acquisitions from the Pacific Northwest and Chesapeake Bay. Whaling artifacts include harpoons, lances, scrimshaw etchings in whalebone, and several paintings of a whaler's work at sea. The modern environmental movement has contributed buttons and other protest artifacts on issues from scenic rivers to biodiversity.
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Paris porcelain candlestick
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- c. 1810
- ID Number
- CE.P-1123
- catalog number
- P-1123
- accession number
- 225282
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
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Stoneware jug
- Description
- The conclusion of the War of 1812 devastated many American potteries as the importation of less expensive, foreign-made wares resumed, mostly from Great Britain and Holland. While a number of potteries went out of business, the Clark and Howe pottery in Athens, New York employed more men than any other pottery in the state, and even expanded into northwestern New York. The firm was in part responsible for sustaining the local economy, paying $1,750 in wages in 1812 (equal to over $22,000 today).
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1805-1813
- maker
- Clark, Nathan
- Howe, Thomas
- ID Number
- 1977.0803.66
- accession number
- 1977.0803
- catalog number
- 1977.0803.066
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
-
Stoneware butter jar
- Description
- This salt-glazed stoneware butter jar is decorated with hand applied cobalt, and is one of the earliest pieces made at the Athens, New York pottery established in 1805 by Nathan Clark and his brother-in-law, Thomas Howe. Howe died in 1813 leaving Clark to run and expand the company. He established subsidiaries in Kingston, Lyons, Rochester and Mt. Morris, New York between 1813 and 1838. The firm prospered until the end of the 1800s.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1805-1813
- maker
- Clark, Nathan
- Howe, Thomas
- ID Number
- 1977.0803.53
- accession number
- 1977.0803
- catalog number
- 1977.0803.053
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
-
Stoneware jar
- Description
- While this jar is unmarked, it may be one of several in the Museum's collection made by Thomas Commeraw, a free black potter. Thomas Commeraw established his pottery in the Corlears Hook neighborhood of lower Manhattan in 1797, successfully competing with well known stoneware makers from the Crolious and Remmey families.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1797-1819
- maker
- Commeraw, Thomas
- ID Number
- 1977.0803.115
- accession number
- 1977.0803
- catalog number
- 1977.0803.115
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
-
Eli Terry Mass-Produced Box Clock
- Description
- In the opening years of the 19th century, a handful of Connecticut inventors and entrepreneurs transformed the way clocks were made in the United States. Recognizing a vast potential market for low-cost domestic clocks, Eli Terry and his associates Seth Thomas and Silas Hoadley applied water-powered machinery to clockmaking. One of the proving grounds of the American Industrial Revolution, clockmaking changed from a craft to a factory process in which machines mass-produced uniform, interchangeable clock parts. This manufacturing technique appeared in other industries about this time and became known as "the American system" of manufacturing.
- The process called for a whole new kind of clock. The first mass-produced clocks had movements of wood, instead of scarce and expensive brass. Although the earliest of these wooden clocks had long pendulums and fitted into traditional tall cases, about 1816 Eli Terry designed a distinctly American clock small enough to set on a mantel or shelf. Sold largely to rural buyers by itinerant merchants, these clocks played an early and significant role in transforming the rural North from overwhelmingly agricultural to a modern market society.
- This clock demonstrates Terry's determination to make his clocks as economical as possible. The case is a simple wooden box and the glass door bears reverse-painted numbers that served as a dial. Terry's success spawned imitators eager to capture part of the market for machine-made clocks. By 1830, western Connecticut was home to over a hundred firms, large and small, making clocks with wooden movements.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- ca 1816
- maker
- Terry, Eli
- ID Number
- ME.317044
- catalog number
- 317044
- accession number
- 233061
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
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Paris porcelain coffee cup and saucer
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1805-1810
- c.1800-1810
- ID Number
- CE.P-104ab
- catalog number
- P-104ab
- accession number
- 225282
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
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Sèvres porcelain plate
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1815-1824
- 1811
- ID Number
- CE.P-660
- catalog number
- P-660
- accession number
- 225282
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
-
Paris porcelain footed bowl
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- c. 1815
- ID Number
- CE.P-90
- catalog number
- P-90
- accession number
- 225282
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
-
Pennsylvania/Kentucky Pistol
- Description
- Physical Description:
- This .54 caliber smoothbore “Kentucky” pistol was assembled by Melchior Fordney. The stock is curly maple, stained with a piano finish. The curved grip has a brass butt cap with a rear extension towards the tang. The brass trigger guard has an English acorn finial with a French front bar. It has two brass ramrod thimbles with two brass side plates.
- It is stamped “C.Arb” on the barrel. “J/Holland” is stamped on the lock. There is a stamp of “IB” possibly for J. Bonewitz.
- History:
- Melchior Fordney made pistols and rifles in Lancaster, Pennsylvania from 1807 to 1843. He was famous for his Kentucky rifles. His life and career were cut short in 1843 when he was killed with an ax by a Baptist Preacher named John Haggerty. Apparently, Haggerty he did not approve of the fact that Fordney lived with a woman outside of wedlock.
- Fordney’s work often had very elaborate detailing and was made one at a time when he was not contracted by the government. This pistol, because of its large size and lack of “C” stamp, is believed to be one of the later pistols of Fordney’s work.
- References:
- Flayderman, Norm. Flayderman’s Guide to Antique American Firearms…and their Values, Gun Digest Books, Iola, 2007. 9th edition
- Gardner, Robert E. Col. Small Arms Makers: A Directory of Fabricators of Firearms, Edged Weapons, Crossbows and Polearms, Crown Publishers Inc, New York: 1963, p. 66
- Smith, Samuel E. and Edwin W. Bitter. Historic Pistols: The American Martial Flintlock 1760-1845, Scalamandre Publications, New York: 1986, p. 308.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- ca 1815
- maker
- Fordney, Melchior
- ID Number
- 1986.0024.16
- accession number
- 1986.0024
- catalog number
- 1986.0024.16
- collector/donor number
- P88L
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
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Worcester porcelain oval dish
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1804-1813
- maker
- Worcester Royal Porcelain Company
- ID Number
- CE.P-826
- accession number
- 225282
- catalog number
- P-826
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
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Worcester porcelain dish
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1804-1813
- 1805 -1813
- ID Number
- CE.P-155
- catalog number
- P-155
- accession number
- 225282
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
-
Meissen porcelain sugar bowl and cover
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1790-1814
- maker
- Meissen Manufactory
- ID Number
- CE.P-1047Aab
- catalog number
- P-1047Aab
- accession number
- 225282
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
-
Paris porcelain coffeepot
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- c. 1810-1815
- ID Number
- CE.P-574ab
- catalog number
- P-574ab
- accession number
- 225282
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
-
Paris Porcelain sugar bowl (part of a service)
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- c.
- c. 1815
- ID Number
- CE.P-579Cab
- catalog number
- P-579Cab
- accession number
- 225282
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
-
Paris porcelain cup and saucer (part of a service)
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- c. 1815
- ID Number
- CE.P-579Dab
- catalog number
- P-579Dab
- accession number
- 225282
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
-
Paris porcelain cup and saucer
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1799-1816
- ID Number
- CE.P-101ab
- catalog number
- P-101ab
- accession number
- 225282
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
-
Paris porcelain cup and saucer
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1799-1816
- ID Number
- CE.P-1072ab
- catalog number
- P-1072ab
- accession number
- 225282
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
-
Meissen porcelain cup and saucer
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1790-1814
- maker
- Meissen Manufactory
- ID Number
- CE.P-48ab
- catalog number
- P-48ab
- accession number
- 225282
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
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Meissen porcelain teapot and cover
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1790-1814
- maker
- Meissen Manufactory
- ID Number
- CE.P-1047Cab
- catalog number
- P-1047Cab
- accession number
- 225282
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
-
Meissen porcelain sugar jar and cover
- Description
- TITLE: Meissen sugar jar from a tête à tête tea and coffee service
- MAKER: Meissen Manufactory
- PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: ceramic, porcelain, hard paste (overall material)
- MEASUREMENTS: 1 5/8 in x 15 3/4 in x 10 1/4 in; 4.1275 cm x 40.005 cm x 26.035 cm
- OBJECT NAME: Tray
- PLACE MADE: Meissen, Saxony, Germany
- DATE MADE: 1805-1815
- SUBJECT: The Alfred Duane Pell Collection
- Domestic Furnishing
- Industry and Manufacturing
- CREDIT LINE: The Alfred Duane Pell Collection
- ID NUMBER: CE*P-896A
- COLLECTOR/ DONOR: Alfred Duane Pell
- ACCESSION NUMBER: 225282
- (DATA SOURCE: National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center)
- MARKS: Crossed swords and a star in underglaze blue .
- This sugar jar is from a Meissen tea and coffee service made for two people, and services of this kind for use at breakfast or for intimate meetings are known as têtê à têtê or cabaret services. Most interesting, however, are the enamel painted topographical images of Egyptian landscapes and antiquities, which date the service to the early nineteenth century after the publication of Baron Dominique Vivant Denon’s Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte (Travels in Lower and Upper Egypt) in 1802.
- In 1798 Denon traveled to Egypt as a member of Napoleon’s large team of scientists, engineers, artists, and scholars appended to the general’s army of about 20,000 troops who occupied Lower Egypt and chased the Mamluk Turks, then rulers of the country, into Upper Egypt. Known as the savants, these men studied and recorded all that they saw of both ancient and modern Egypt. As an artist, art collector, and antiquarian, Denon marveled at the sites of Egyptian antiquity and recorded in drawings everything that he could get down on paper while traveling with a battalion of the French army into Upper Egypt. His drawings, later engraved and published in the Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte are still a valuable record of Egypt’s ancient sites before the archaeological excavations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the construction of the first and second Aswan Dams.
- Napoleon’s campaign was not a military success, his fleet destroyed by the British at the Battle of Abū Qīr Bay near Alexandria on August 1, 1798, thus isolating the French army on land in Egypt and restoring British control over the Mediterranean Sea. His team of scientists, engineers and artists, however, were undoubtedly successful in bringing new knowledge of ancient Egypt to Europe and America. Denon’s Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte was a very successful publication and the spirited account of his experiences was soon translated into English and other languages. It is likely that the enamel paintings on this tea and coffee service were commissioned privately by someone who owned a copy of the Voyage. When compared with the original drawings there are differences in detail and composition, which was not unusual, but for the most part the Meissen painters were faithful to Denon’s record, which was not in color, unlike the rich polychrome enamels seen on the porcelain.
- The parts of the service are molded in the severe, but nevertheless ornate, neoclassical style fashionable in designs of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With its origins in France artists and designers who worked in the neoclassical style took inspiration from ancient Roman and Greek art and architecture. Neoclassicism in its most ideologically pure form expressed a taste for elevated, didactic, and moral subjects in rejection of the court culture of the old regime prior to the French Revolution. In the German States, and especially in Berlin, the neoclassical style was favored by designers and architects.
- On the sugar jar we see the remains of a temple portico with eight columns and a winged sun disk dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Hathor, a structure dated to the Greek Ptolemaic period in Egypt, and in the later Roman colonial period associated with the goddess Isis. Denon identified the monument as “Contra Latopolis”, opposite Latopolis, the town of the Lates fish (lates was the Greek name for Nile perch). Situated on the east bank of the Nile Contra Latopolis faced the town of Latopolis, or Esne, site of a larger temple, part of which stands today. The smaller temple of Contra Latopolis was destroyed in 1828 to make way for a modern building. Baron Denon’s original drawing of the temple portico records another site that was lost in the nineteenth century.
- Continuous habitation on the island of Elephantine (Jazīrat Aswan) makes it difficult to identify the site of the painting on the other side of the sugar pot. Elephantine is an island in the river Nile opposite the town of Aswan in the far south of Egypt, and in ancient Nubia it was a center for trade with sub-Saharan Africa, and the southernmost point for Egyptian border control. Enchanted by the site and its monuments, Baron Denon wrote: “The Isle of Elephantina became, at the same time, my country house, my palace of delight, observation, and research…. I never passed hours more deliciously occupied than those which I devoted to my solitary walks at Elephantina;” He had the place to himself after French troops drove the inhabitants out of their homes. Today, archaeological excavations and reconstruction have returned some of the ancient monuments to the site.
- This service belongs to the Alfred Duane Pell collection in the National Museum of American History. Before Pell (1864-1924) became an Episcopalian clergyman quite late in life, he and his wife Cornelia Livingstone Crosby Pell (1861-1938) travelled widely, and as they travelled they collected European porcelains, silver, and furniture. Pell came from a wealthy family and he purchased the large William Pickhardt Mansion on 5th Avenue and East 74th Street in which to display his vast collection. The Smithsonian was one of several institutions to receive substantial bequests from the Reverend Pell which laid the foundation for their collections of European applied arts.
- Bob Brier, Napoleon in Egypt, exhibition catalog Hillwood Art Museum, Brookville, New York: 1990.
- Bob Brier, Egyptomania: Our Three Thousand Year Obsession with the Land of the Pharaohs, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
- James Stevens Curl, Egyptomania, the Egyptian Revival: a Recurring Theme in the History of Taste, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994.
- Egyptomania: Egypt in Western Art 1730-1930, exhibition catalog, National Gallery of Canada with the Louvre, Paris, 1994.
- Paul V. Gardner, 1956, 1966 (rev. ed.), Meissen and other German Porcelain in the Alfred Duane Pell Collection.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1805-1815
- maker
- Meissen Manufactory
- ID Number
- CE.P-896Eab
- catalog number
- P-896Eab
- accession number
- 225282
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
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