Month: July 2010

George Washington’s whiskey sells again

Modern(ish), Museums

George Washington's Distillery todayWhen George Washington returned to Mount Vernon in 1797 after his second and last term as president, he decided to get into the whiskey business. The first president was an excellent businessman who ran a variety of successful ventures as well as the farm.

In 1771, he built a stone gristmill 3 miles from the main house which produced high quality flour and cornmeal for export to the West Indies and Europe. He had a progressive outlook for the latest technology, and the gristmill was powered by a huge automated waterwheel system called the Oliver Evans Automated Milling System, which was U.S. Patent No. 3. The system worked and Washington’s gristmill business was still going swimmingly 26 years later when he came back from his stint as a civil servant.

His farm manager James Anderson was Scottish, and he suggested Washington build a distillery next to the gristmill. It was an immediate success. By the time George Washington died two years later, the distillery was producing 11,000 gallons of whiskey a year, making it the largest distillery in the country and one the most lucrative endeavors at Mount Vernon.

Now, almost 215 years after the first bottle of Washington’s rye whiskey was first sold, whiskey made from his original recipe in the restored distillery has gone on sale again.

Unlike whiskey made today, however, the general’s batch wasn’t aged. According to historians, the saying goes that Washington’s whiskey was aged from the time it took to get from Mount Vernon to Alexandria for sale, all of a distance of eight miles. […]

The un-aged spirit calls for a mash of rye, corn and malted barley. After distilling the mash two times it is ready to go. Some have referred to the substance as post revolutionary white lightning. Dennis Pogue says that’s not so far from the truth.

“This is frankly a lot like white lightning,” Pogue said. “Except that unlike moonshine, this of course was legal. Washington, we know, paid his taxes. He paid $300 in taxes in 1799. So, it was very legal.”

Historians spent over a decade restoring the distillery and researching Washington’s recipe. The distillery opened for tours 3 years ago, staffed by knowledgeable distillers in period garb, but it was only this year that the Virginia General Assembly allowed the production of a very small amount of whiskey for sale. Only 471 bottles were produced and despite the hefty price tag of $85 apiece, the run sold out pretty much immediately.

Mount Vernon is hoping to produce a second run next year, so if you’re in the market for some George Washington XXX white lightning, be prepared to get in line nice and early. Meanwhile, the distillery and gristmill are open for visitors during normal business hours between April 1st and October 31st. You can always buy some souvenir cornmeal from the gristmill in lieu of moonshine.

18th c. ship found at World Trade Center site

Modern(ish), Treasures

18th c. ship on World Trade Center siteWorkers digging the site of the future World Trade Center underground parking center uncovered the remains of an 18th century ship. Maps as far back as 1797 show Washington Street on the site, and the area had not been developed in the construction of the original WTC, so the ship has been hidden under there for a couple hundred years at least.

It’s not the first time a ship has been found on what is now dry land on the Manhattan waterfront, but it has been almost 30 years since the last one was uncovered on Water Street.

It’s not the complete ship. It’s a 30-foot section of the keel of a vessel that was probably twice or maybe even 3 times that length whole. Archaeologists think it was deliberately deposited on the site as landfill to expand the island real estate. New Yorkers were known to throw everything and the kitchen sink into these foundation pits, so why not a third of a ship?

Conservation is a major issue. As soon as the timbers were excavated from their comfy muck and exposed to the air, they started to degrade. Meanwhile, construction continues all around, so archaeologists are scrambling to measure and record everything they can for later analysis.

Excavators found several other interesting finds, both on the ship itself and in the area. There was a leather right shoe, an anchor and some spikes that might help narrow down the ship’s age. Dendrochronological analysis (counting tree rings) should also be able to pinpoint the date.

Perhaps the most puzzling and intriguing find was a semicircular metal collar, several feet across, apparently supported on a brick base, built into the hull. Perhaps it was some sort of an oven or steam contraption.

Some of the whaling enthusiasts commenting on the article suggested that it was a fire-powered fixture that helped sailors process blubber. Archaeologists point out that it’s more likely have been a garden variety cooking platform. The blubber processing apparatus would have been larger.

Happy Bastille Day!

Modern(ish)

On July 14, 1789, enraged by the firing of finance minister Jacques Necker, the people of Paris stormed the Bastille looking for guns and ammo and to free any political prisoners they might find. (There were actually only 7 prisoners in the Bastille at that point, but plenty of weapons and gunpowder, so it worked out in the end.)

A year later, the people of Paris hauled ass to the Champ de Mars outside the city and prepared the grounds for a grand ceremonial feast, the Fête de la Fédération. There King Louis XVI swore an oath to uphold the constitutional of France, and the centuries of absolute monarchy officially ended. The celebrants considered this the end of the revolution and a huge public feast that lasted for 4 days followed.

Since we’ve all flipped to the end of this book, we know things didn’t go quite that smoothly. It wasn’t until 1880 that France officially passed a law making July 14th the national holiday. For those who were not huge fans of the revolutionary fervor which ran so much blood through the streets, they could consider it a celebration of the Fête de la Fédération, a day which had seen French people from all walks of life united and happy.

And now, because everyone loves an Internet quiz, find out how much you know about Bastille Day as represented in literature: Bastille in Literature quiz. I got 8 out 10, but I must confess that 1 of them I only got because I just saw A Tale of Two Cities which was showing on teevee in honor of the day. (Protip: Basil Rathbone makes ruthless aristocrats look goooood.)

'La prise de la Bastille' by Charles Thévenin, 1793

Rare bowls found in 17th c. London trash

Museums, Renaissance, Treasures

Three elaborately decorated 17th c. Delftware bowls have been found by archaeologists excavating a period garbage pit on the south bank of Thames. The Southwark area of London was a party neighborhood in the 17th century, with bars, brothels and spectacles galore. The bowls would not have been as valuable then as they are now, but to find them thrown away in the red light district is still a surprising turn.

The pieces are a charger platter from the 1660s painted with tulips, a bowl painted with a boy taunting a dog, and a bowl dated 1674 which commemorates the marriage of Mr. Nathaniel Townsend of the Leathersellers Company. They’re tin-glazed, a ceramic known today as Delftware even when made in Britain rather than in the famous Dutch ceramics center of Delft.

Roy Stephenson, Head of Archaeological Collections at the Museum of London, said the richly decorated bowls should be seen as rare pieces of fine art in their own right today.

“The thing about tin-glazed wear is every piece is unique because it is painted individually by hand,” he told Reuters.

“The analogy I use about 17th century Delftware is: if you were to try and acquire 17th century art today you would have to be a multi millionaire,” said Stephenson, adding that it was the most unusual group find he had seen in the last 20 years.

There are no signatures or artists’ marks, but the ceramics would have been seen as pieces of art for display on tables and mantelpieces, not as food vessels or utilitarian items.

The bowls were found in fragments during preparation for an upcoming rail extension. Archaeologists pieced them back together. There are still a few bits missing, but there’s more than enough left to make a handsome display in the “War, Plague and Fire” gallery of the Museum of London.

17 century Delftware bowls found in Southwark

Uproar over Italian legislation that would legalize looted antiquities

Looting, Modern(ish), Social policy

Italian legislators attempted to sneak a little nasty into the state budget this year. The “archaeo-remittance” measure would give anyone who possesses antiquities a big ol’ way out of trouble: simply declare you’ve owned it from before December 31, 2009, pay a fee and get a 30 year license. No need to prove a history of ownership, certainly no need to know where it was originally found. This would legalize the ownership of looted goods on a massive scale.

The declared purpose of the law is to recover undocumented patrimony and to allow it to be catalogued. In reality the law will end up being an enormous boon to looters and organized criminals, the so-called “archaeomafia,” involved in illegal digging and international trafficking of antiquities.

We’re not dealing here with the remittance of the common earthenware jar or ceramic pot that a farmer happened to unearth in his field or that an enthusiast has misguidedly acquired, but of an indiscriminate legalization of archaeological antiquities from clandestine excavations, unethically removed from the collective archaeological record with irreparable harm to the finds themselves, especially in terms of provenance. […]

The antiquities thus “legalized” will also probably be allowed to be bequeathed in wills or even sold. The department of cultural heritage will only have the power to contest the declared value of the artifact and request the difference.

Thus overnight, the law will officially transform looters and the “archaeomafia,” which the current legal system condemns and prosecutes, into collectors and managers of cultural heritage, who with the antiquities they have robbed from the public patrimony, can engage, legally, in commercial activities and with museums and art galleries.

Enjoying that chill running up and down your spine?

Similar laws have come up in the Italian legislature before, but they were always defeated by the subsequent uproar from the archaeological community and supporters. This time things were scarier because instead of being proposed as a law unto itself, it was a measure attached to the budget, and legislators tend to pass budgets no matter what heinousness lies within.

There is good news, however. The Italian National Association of Archaeologists (ANA) has raised hell and the story got traction in the Italian press and all over the Internet. There’s a Facebook group protesting the measure and an online petition. (The text of the Facebook page and the petition is the same as the open letter I link to and quote above, just fyi.)

In the space of just a few days, the ruckus has forced a retreat. The parliamentary majority has said they will not add the archeo-remittance measure to the state budget. Assuming they actually make good on that, the acute danger will settle into a chronic one. The measure will remain in the pipeline as proposed bill, so the ruckus must remain loud to keep the scoundrels from making this monstrosity law.