In Syracuse, New York, I live in an apartment complex built in the mid 1960s, next to a public-memorial/park style cemetery that has been in use since the 1840s.  The dominant artifacts in drip lines and other erosion features around the apartments are sherds of window glass and terra-cotta flower pots, along with a smaller amount of glazed, white earthenwares and more vitreous wares.  A local acquaintance, who grew up in Syracuse and remembered the city from the late 1930s, told me that the apartment site held a large, commercial greenhouse before construction of the apartments.  The greenhouse's market was people buying flowers to memorialize loved ones buried in the cemetery.  I'll hazard a guess, and say that the white earthenware/vitreous wares sherds are from "florist" vases, intended for use as containers for the memorial flowers.  (The more "refined" sherds I have seen are small, and usually degraded; I haven't examined them closely enough to begin to determine vessel forms.)  Extrapolating, I connect this to funeral customs, and the 19th-century park-cemetery movement, and do not see these artifacts as, directly, gendered.  This may be a case of incomplete context, as I do not have information as to the gender, age, or ethnicity of the owner of or workers in the greenhouse.  But, I would say that this context (during the first half of the 20th century) was primarily commercial.

D. Babson.

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From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Suzanne Spencer-Wood [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, December 28, 2012 7:57 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Flower pots

Hello Jay,
I have inferred the meaning of flowerpots in the dominant gender
ideology from the most popular domestic manual of the second half of the
19th century - The American Woman's Home by Catharine Beecher and her
famous sister Harriet Beecher Stowe. They designed and advocated a home
conservatory in a parlor bay window, with plants of various sizes in
flowerpots,as well as a terrarium, to bring a family's children into
contact with the morally reforming influence of God's natural world, which
was associated with women. Beecher and Stowe were among the reform women I
call domestic reformers because they valorized women's supposed innate
superior morality due to the closeness of women and their domestic sphere
to nature, removed from men's public capitalist sphere that permitted the
biblical sins of usury, price gouging, and labor exploitation, which were
all illegal in the theocracy of the Massachusetts Bay colony. Some domestic
reformers created children's gardens and playgrounds, as well as prison
gardens (currently reviving), to morally reform juveniles and prisoners by
bringing them into contact with God's natural world, which was associated
with women in the dominant gender ideology.

The inference about the meaning of flowerpots is made in the following
publication:

Spencer-Wood, Suzanne M. 1999    The World Their Household: Changing
Meanings of the Domestic Sphere in the Nineteenth Century.  In *The
Archaeology of Household Activities,* edited by Penelope M. Allison. Pp.
162-89. Routledge, London.    flowerpot meaning on p. 183

The moral meaning of nature motivating reform women to create green spaces
such as children's gardens and playgrounds in men's "sinful cities of
stone" is in:

Spencer-Wood, Suzanne M. 2003. Gendering the Creation of Green Urban
landscapes in America at the Turn of the Century.  In *Shared Spaces and
Divided Places. Material Dimensions of Gender Relations and the American
Historical Landscape*, edited by D.L. Rotman and E. Savulis. Pp. 24-61.
Knoxville, U. of Tennessee Press.

I would be very interested to know if you find more about the meaning of
gardens at asylums. I was the outside reviewer on Susan Piddock's PhD
dissertation.

regards,

suzanne






On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 6:55 PM, Stottman, Michael J <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> I am looking for any information on studies of flower pots.  In
> particular, I am trying locate good resources on the history of terra cotta
> flower pots and relationship of size to use.  Also I am looking for info on
> greenhouse heating systems.  The session at the SHA conference in Baltimore
> last year was very good and I have some great resources from the histarch
> discussion of greenhouses and orangeries a couple of years ago, but I am
> looking more specifically at the mid to late nineteenth century and within
> an institutional context.  I am working on a greenhouse at the Eastern
> State Lunatic Asylum in Lexington, Kentucky where I have brick foundations,
> trench features associated with a heating system (seems to be for hearth
> and ash clean-out), and thousands of terra cotta flower pot sherds of
> various sizes.  I am looking to relate these resources to nineteenth
> century philosophies of architectural and landscape designs for asylums,
> such as the Kirkbride model and to treatment philosophies (I have Susan
> Piddock's edited volume and diss.).  Any suggestions for historical
> references or archaeological studies of flower pots and greenhouses would
> be much appreciated, I am trying make sure I am not missing anything.
>
>
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
>
>
> Jay
>
>
>
> M. Jay Stottman
> Staff Archaeologist
> Kentucky Archaeological Survey
>