Description:
Dipper with the bowl made from 2/3 of a coconut shell. Pewter has been applied around the edge to form a rim and to attach the turned wooden handle to the bowl. According to scholar Kathleen Kennedy, coconut shell dippers were an ordinary houseware manufactured widely in the United States. The most famous maker associated with these dippers is Cleveland & Bros of Providence, Rhode Island. They were a furniture company who operated in Providence from the 1830s until their bankruptcy in the 1880s and they seem to have regularly marked their dippers. Therefore an unmarked dipper would have been made by another firm. Coconut shells were used because they were inexpensive, not exotic. The coconut shells were not usually souvenirs from the tropics, but a normal by-product of the food industry, made into dippers thanks to their attractive hardwood coupled with thriftiness. The dippers were used primarily for drinking fresh water out of a bucket. For more information, see Kathleen E. Kennedy, "Why 19th-Century Americans Drank from Coconut Shells," Gastro Obscura Blog post, December 4, 2017. During a visit of the Pewter Collectors Club in October 2002, this ladle was recognized as similar to one marked by Cleveland and Brothers in a private collection; the collector's version has a button screw head with name of "Cleveland and Brothers". For more information about these pewter-rimmed coconut dippers, see John Kerfoot's book on American Pewter. Acquired from Reginald French of Amherst, Mass.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+72.083 |
