A 200+ Year Old Jigsaw Puzzle

Here we have a post from Yvette Kirby, one of a team of intrepid volunteers working to clean and piece together artifacts for the exhibit. Like most everything the Historical Society undertakes, this exhibit would quite literally not be possible without the dedicated support of our volunteers.

For the past several weeks, a team of volunteers has been painstakingly cleaning, and, where possible, mending the artifacts inventoried by the UMass archaeology team. We have removed accumulated dirt, excess glue from previous mending efforts, and the identifying numbers applied (in red nail polish!) during the 1965 dig, using Q-tips, cotton balls, acetone, and much patience. Diane O’Shaughnessy scrubbed an interesting array of buttons, beads, cuff links, eyeglass pieces, combs, and other samples of personal adornment items. The acetone unfortunately gives off strong fumes, so from time to time we’ve had to hang out the window of Munroe Tavern to inhale fresh air.

Mending items has been a challenge, even for those who enjoy jigsaw puzzles. The first question is whether any pieces seem to fit together. Then the challenge is to find the exact spot where two pieces are married, apply ceramic adhesive and hold it until it sets (without gluing your fingers to the artifact). Then the pieces are left to dry overnight, propped up in a box of sand. We have fragments of at least three tin-glazed earthenware plates, all decorated in a lovely blue and white Delft floral pattern. But which pieces go with which? After much study and discussion, we isolated two sets of fragments in the shape of plates, but they proved impossible to repair. The earthenware base is too thick for the ceramic adhesive to hold, and the brittle tin glaze is too flaky to work with.

Dallas Gale had more luck with a glazed redware dish with white slip decoration. She painstakingly fit multiple fragments together, then glued and reglued them with ceramic adhesive, holding them for long periods of time, then taping them while they dried in a bed of sand. Lois Wells struggled with an Iberian unglazed redware storage jar. It was so porous that the adhesive simply soaked into the fragments. But after many tries, and long periods of holding the pieces together, there are now enough fragments put together to give a good sense of the jar’s shape.

Elaine Doran succeeded in piecing together a lovely white-glazed stoneware bowl and a Rhenish salt glazed chamber pot. She also tackled a glass wine bottle. This was hard to piece together because there wasn’t much surface to hold onto, but with tape holding it together while drying, it now looks like what it is. I worked on a Chinese export porcelain tea bowl and saucers with mixed success. The porcelain is beautiful and very delicate, and I had to remend pieces several times.

The thrill of handling these 200-year old objects far outweighed the frustrations of mending. It was fun to think about how these objects may have been used by the Rev. Hancock’s family, and to try to picture Mrs. Hancock serving tea or the Reverend himself buckling his shoes.