The Magical Mystery Plate

One of the coolest, but least likely thrills of living in an old house is stumbling upon something that may have come from, or is related to, your house.  In nearly ten years, it had happened to us only one time, until this month.  As of this week, however, we have added a piece that may or may not be associated with the Enos Kellogg House, but that needed to become part of our collection in any case.

Redware Plate, Norwalk, Connecticut.  Circa 1840.  Inscribed "Enos".

The picture above is of a circa 1840 redware plate manufactured here in Norwalk, Connecticut, fewer than five miles from our home.  With an inscription of "Enos", it is almost too good of a story to be true. 

Norwalk was a major manufacturing center for stoneware and redware in the 19th century, and we have put together a fairly nice collection of local pieces over the past ten years.  Norwalk redware plates are famous for their distinctive slip decoration, and somewhat generic aphorisms, biblical phrases and other words were commonly inscribed on pieces.  There are also more customized pieces, created specifically to commemorate particular events or individuals.  Operating on the assumption that such a unique customization is most likely to have originated close to the place of manufacture, and with census research showing only a handful of individuals named Enos in Norwalk and surrounding towns in the 1830s and 1840s, it is entirely possible that this plate references or memorializes the Enos Kellogg who built our house and died in 1833, or his nephew and namesake, whose father was raised by the elder Enos Kellogg in our house.  Of course, there is also more than a reasonable chance that it references some entirely unrelated Enos, but cut me a little slack here.  I prefer to think that this piece came from our house, somehow ended up at an auction in Maryland, and magically returned to its city and house of origin some 170 years after it emerge from the kiln.  Ten years of paint scraping, construction dust, sweat equity investment and restoration wounds should buy me a little karmic treat, right?

So, the Norwalk redware Enos plate has been claimed by the Enos Kellogg Homestead, and thanks to some spirited on-site bidding by my parents in Maryland, here it will reside. 

A Little Motivation Goes a Long Way

Not unlike my fits-and-starts approach to blogging, our house has been languishing in a mini-purgatory of half completed projects.  I start on something with every expectation of bringing it to swift completion, only to find myself putting it aside "temporarily" as life intervenes.  Most glaringly, there are a number of partially completed painting projects around the house that I was counting on our now AWOL painter to finish up. 

Luckily, I have found some motivation in the form of our inclusion on a historic house tour in September.  The Enos Kellogg House will be one of four featured properties on the Norwalk Preservation Trust's "Norwalk's Living History Tour: Historic Homes from 1675 to 1830".  It should be lots of fun, but for the time being, it is the kick in the butt that I needed to finally wrap up some of the loose ends.  Living room, entry hall and dressing room all need lots of prep and paint.  I'm feeling pretty good about progress in the living room, but we'll see how long that is sustained.

For anyone who wants to see if I can achieve some sort of paint closure, please check out the house tour information on the NPT's website:  http://norwalkpreservation.org/pages/events/tours.html.