What would you take with you if you had to suddenly pack up and evacuate? That hypothetical question became a reality for many of us as the recent wildfires exploded. Some people were given notice and had the chance to hastily pack a few things. Others didn't have the luxury of time and didn't know if they would have a home to return to.
On Instagram, a picture from a 2018 fire resurfaced. It was a set of china carefully stacked underwater on the steps of a swimming pool. It made us consider that image, and the concept of value, from a different point of view.
In a recent New York Times piece, reporter Rukmini Callimachi features the story of Ashley Dumulong. Ashley has the China of her great, great grandmother, and Rukmini questions how it's made it this far.
Evan Kleiman: What is china? Why do we call it china?
Rukmini Callimachi: China is basically a form of porcelain, and like its name, was invented in China then it made its way to Europe. As far back as the 1600s and the 1700s, the noble classes in Europe increasingly showed an interest in eating off of their own dish. It used to be that eating was very much this communal thing that was done out of troughs. As recently as the 1800s in America, Americans were still eating this way.
Imagine a large wooden bowl like you would have a salad in with everybody eating with their hands out of it, or with a single spoon. Among the innovations of the Industrial Revolution was the thought that each person should have their own setting. One historian described it as the beginning of the "one man, one spoon movement," and from there, it just kind of went crazy. Where not just "one man, one spoon" and "one woman, one spoon," but special implements, like a fork used to eat the flesh of a grapefruit or a special spoon used to take out an oyster, a dessert fork, etc.
For your article, you read five books, spoke to curators and historians, and you interviewed two dozen people before zeroing in on this one family's heirlooms. Yes, tell us how you conceived this piece and then how you found Ashley.
I was looking, initially, to interview mothers and daughters about fine china. It was, in part, an idea that my editor came up with. It's in light of the fact that I think so many Generation X women now are ending up with multiple sets of china. It's come to sort of a terminus where grandparents and mothers and loved ones are dying and they're passing them on, and it's ending up in a bottleneck of sometimes a single child that wants it, and much of it is ending up in thrift stores, at the dump, in landfills.
I went to Facebook, and I found a number of groups. One was called "Beautiful Table Settings of America," and I just posted in there, saying, "Hi, my name is Rukmini Callimachi and I'm doing a story about the rise and fall of fine china, and I'm looking for people who might want to be interviewed." I was immediately contacted by a distant friend of mine who happened to be in one of these groups, and who said, "Rukmini, I think your account has been hacked." That's because I've covered terrorism for a good part of my career at the New York Times, and so it felt a little bit off-topic. But in any case, it was really me, and I began speaking to families.
Throughout this conversation, Ashley Dumulong’s story just really stayed with me, because she has such a long arc in this particular story. She was able, through census records that I then verified myself, to discover that her great-great-grandmother had come from England in 1906 on the SS Cymric. I was able to find the passengers' manifest, found her name, found the names of her daughters, and found a notation that at the moment when she arrived in Boston Harbor in the spring of 1906, she was one of the passengers in steerage that had less than $50 on her person.
So she was poor, even by the standards of people traveling in the most crowded class of service on a ship liner. From there, she went on to buy this absolutely beautiful set, which historians and experts dated to roughly a decade after her arrival in the US. From then on, it was passed on from woman to woman to woman, before making it into Ashley's hands. Ashley lives in San Antonio in Texas. She's the mother of two very active sons, neither of whom wants it. So it was sort of a love song.
Ashley Dumulong sits among the 20 settings of china that originally belonged to her great-great-grandmother. Photo by Josh Huskin for The New York Times.
Let's talk about the great-great-grandmother. Is that Laura Jane?
Yes, Laura Jane Briggs.
What was the state of the china industry at that time that Laura Jane acquired her set?
When Laura Jane got down in Boston Harbor in 1906, the country as a whole was gripped with what historians call "china mania" or "china fever." Just in Boston, there were at least three dozen shops that specialized in china and the accouterments for a formal dinner. This was very much an object through which a person who was aspiring to be middle class could show off that they had reached the middle class.
One of the interesting statistics that I was able to dig up through the work of historian Regina Lee Blaszczyk is that at that point in time, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, American consumers were spending, on average, 13% of their annual income on tableware, on dishes.
That's just unimaginable.
Yeah, I just did the math taking the median salary across the US, that's the equivalent of somebody today spending around $10,000 a year on dishes, on pretty plates.
How did Laura Jane showcase her pieces? When you bought a china set, did you also buy a particular type of cabinet specifically made to show them off?
Let me just mention that the china set that Laura Jane Briggs bought is a brand called Haviland & Company. I had never heard of it. Let me just say that I'm a complete newbie to china. I have none of my own and so this is all new to me but I did some research, and Haviland & Company was a brand that was considered very high-end. It was, in fact, the brand that the White House used. You see it in the White House registry going back to the administration of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant.
So she arrives in the New World, and this is the set that she chooses, the one that is in the White House. Her being a woman who had been orphaned at a very young age as a teenager in England, when she acquired this it must have felt like the equivalent of buying your first house or a very major purchase, like you've made it.
Starting in the late 1800s china cabinets, a way to display these things, become common in catalogs. Around the same time, you start seeing that in plan books for houses, including small ones, the dining room is something that is set off from the rest of the house. It's a separate place that has a kind of ritual, a celebratory function, where you have a meal as a family, and where there's a china cabinet on the wall, and you set off these beautiful objects.
It bears noting that, of course, the wealthy had a dining room before this. The White House, the presidents of the US ate in dining rooms. But you're now seeing, at the turn of the century, that this becomes mainstream. There's even a DIY book that I found that described how somebody who didn't have the means to buy a china cabinet could make one themselves by basically taking a closet, taking off the door, putting a curtain on it, and using the curtain, moving it back and forth to be able to show off the pretty dishes that you have there.
Amazing. I'd like to get more into the family story. So what are Ashley's first memories of using this table? Where was it used as she was growing up? Or was it purely a revered set of objects?
Ashley has a distinct memory of going to spend weekends with her grandmother in Texas. She and her grandmother, she called her "Nana," would have elaborate tea parties using the dishes. She remembers her grandmother making dainty little sandwiches and dainty little cakes. They would sit and eat them together. There was a beautiful cuckoo clock and the grandmother would wait for it to ring, then Ashley would ask her if she could rewind it so that they could hear it again. And they would hear the cuckoo clock ring again.
Her memory is unusual in the sense that many of the people I interviewed described how this was something very important that was brought out only once or twice a year — Thanksgiving, Christmas, maybe Easter. It wasn't a habitual thing, and I think that is part of the reason why fine china has really fallen on hard times in our culture. Many of us live in apartments now. There's not a lot of space, and it's difficult to have, you know, this elaborate set that you use only once or twice a year.
We should say that when Laura Jane bought this set, you could only buy china as a huge set and many manufacturers didn't yet begin by selling place settings. So I'm curious how many pieces remain in Ashley's set, and what have been some casualties?
It was a 20-serving set, so 20 places for a dinner. But along the way, there was a teacup that was broken by Laura Jane, the first matriarch that had it, and has been very beautifully redone. There's been a soup tureen that was broken. There was a berry bowl that was broken, and I believe there was a plate that was broken, all of which have been fixed. But Ashley describes how it was very important to her when she broke a berry bowl, in the age of eBay, that she used her own hands to fix it as a way to show care for these objects that meant so very much to her foremothers.
Laura Jane Briggs arrived in Boston from England in 1906 on the SS Cymric. Photo courtesy of Ashley Dumulong.
I think all of these people who don't know what to do with their china, I think restaurants need to just start using all of these old China sets mixed and matched. They carry so many stories. It just makes me sad to think of them as being abandoned.
I know, it really does. I'm preparing a story that's going to come out in a couple days based on the comments of readers that are really engaged with this piece. One of the themes in their comments is "just use it." I have examples of people who have really expensive china that they're using to have everything from hot dogs to spaghetti with meatballs to Chinese takeout to Domino's Pizza. The idea that this is something that should just stay locked away, essentially ensures its demise. But if you just use it, you know it's okay, it'll break, but at least it's getting used and it's and it is so beautiful.
Why do you think younger people are not interested in fine china any longer? Because we don't have room or mental space for something that's just beautiful and gets locked away?
I think there have been a couple of significant trends in how we gather as people, and it's not just young people. We still, as a society, gather a lot, but we gather for barbecues in the backyard, for Super Bowl Sundays, for cocktails. We don't gather, as a society as much, for a very formal and kind of fussy, if I can say, dinner at a table with china that can't be put into the dishwasher.
Do women in your family have china that's been passed down?
You know, I'm a refugee from communist Romania. So we lost everything when we left when I was a five year old child. But I remember, when we first got to Western Europe, and my mother, who is a dental surgeon, got her first job. She brought home this beautiful set of blue China that had, if I remember correctly, a peacock on the side that wrapped around the tea cups. I was at her home in Romania about a year ago, and I remember seeing just one piece on the back of her cabinet. I've been asking my mom, "Mom, can you go look that up? Can you just take a picture of the back of it?" I have this thought that maybe I can go on eBay and try to replace it.
It's so interesting when we started this conversation, and I was thinking in the context of these fires we've recently experienced and how people had to make these decisions about what to keep. Of course, you wouldn't take your china, right? But now I feel like, why wouldn't you take at least some of your china? Because it's so precious.
Just before you called, I was working on the story of a young woman from Altadena who lost her entire house. I went to visit it last week, and it's one of those houses that is just razed to the ground where the fire was so hot you can't even make out anything, not a piece of metal. The only object she found that survived was a teacup. A teacup, because, of course, china is forged in fire.