Did Celiast Smith ever admire the intricate artistry on Spode ceramic dishes, saucers and cups? It’s more than likely, said Meagan Huff, curator at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, since Spode was so commonly used at the fort in the mid-1800s.
This summer, an exhibit about women’s lives in pioneer days and a display of rare pieces from the fort’s peerless collection of Spode ceramics are on display at the visitor center on Officers Row. They’re free to see and fascinating to absorb — as the neighboring displays set the lives of local women and their families against a backdrop of global trade and historical happenings in the 1800s.
The Celiast Smith exhibit is mostly virtual, as visitors are invited to point phones at a QR code to access her remarkable tale. It is part of a nationwide, summertime, National Park Service project called “Home and Homelands,” bringing women’s history to the foreground through artifacts and stories at 30 different national park sites.
The Spode display in an adjoining room features real archaeological Spode pieces — whole and fragmented — including several that have not been seen by the public, Huff said. It also features Spode-inspired pen-and-ink artworks by New York artist Rob Strati. The visitor center may offer a livestreamed talk with Strati later this summer.
Woman on the move
It was logical for Fort Vancouver to partner with Lewis and Clark National Historical Park, on the Oregon Coast, to tell the story of Celiast Smith for the National Park Service’s “Home and Homelands” project, Huff said.
Smith “is an interesting link between our two points,” Huff said. Her remarkably independent life and travels make her an emblematic — yet under-known — figure in Northwest settlement history, Huff said.
Celiast Helen Coboway Smith was born in 1801, the daughter of a Clatsop tribal chief who was notably hospitable to Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery as it camped on the Oregon Coast and labored to build a shelter there.
So hospitable, in fact, that the chief’s daughter eventually married a French-Canadian man and moved to Fort Vancouver, where the newlyweds joined a whole society of mixed families — Indigenous women married to Hudson’s Bay Company men. Smith and her family probably lived in the fort’s employee village, Huff said.
“Native women were in many ways the central players,” according to the exhibit narrative by historian Nicole Martin. “They acted as cultural contacts and interpreters, providing Hudson’s Bay Company men strategic access to traditional trade networks, while also performing essential labor.”
But Smith’s husband was a drinker and an abuser, and she escaped the marriage.
In that time and place, common-law “fur-trader marriages” were easily dissolved for many reasons, including evidence of abuse, Huff said. Smith then paired with the fort’s schoolteacher, and the couple moved first to the Willamette Valley and then back to Smith’s Clatsop homeland on the Oregon Coast.
Outliving her husband, Smith became a key Clatsop advocate, negotiator and peacemaker — even as Oregon eventually outlawed marriages between white and Indigenous people, and suppressed the stories of women like Smith.
“She was a woman who took matters into her own hands,” Huff said.
Spode node
Alongside the Celiast Smith exhibit is a small display from Fort Vancouver’s big collection of intricately decorated and detailed Spode ceramics. The collection is a popular draw for historians and researchers because it’s the richest collection of its type, Huff said. The Spode company was founded in England in 1770, and the distinctive dinnerware is still in production.
“We have the world’s largest collection of archaeologically recovered Spode,” Huff said — that is, Spode that was literally found in the ground.
Trash pits, privies and a former pond (now gone) in the worker village alongside the fort are where whole Spode pieces and many, many sherds have been discovered across decades of digging, said cultural resources manager Theresa Langford.
Many what? Sherd is almost interchangeable with shard — except that sherd refers to a pottery fragment found in an archaeological site. If you break ceramics at home, you wind up with shards. If archaeologists dig broken ceramics out of the ground, they prefer to call them sherds.
Whether they’re whole or in sherds, why is Fort Vancouver the world’s premiere archaeological node for Spode? Because the Spode company of mid-1800s England “had an exclusive contract to supply all Hudson’s Bay Company forts in North America with Spode,” Langford said.
“All the Spode destined for western forts came through Fort Vancouver, which was their supply depot,” she said. “These ceramics wound up all over the continent.”
While much Spode that came through Fort Vancouver was sent elsewhere, Langford added, much of it also stayed on-site, where it was available to whomever could afford to buy it at the Hudson’s Bay equivalent of the company store.
“Affordability depended on what the purchaser’s job was,” Langford said. “If you were an officer of the company, you could afford it for your dining table. If you were a tradesman or trapper or laborer in the village, it was much less affordable.”
Ironically, Langford said, it was the lowest-paid employees who also faced the steepest price mark-up on Spode. “It was a hard system for the working class,” she said.
Many bought Spode on credit anyway. “It was a status symbol,” Langford said.
But the archaeological record also tells us that Spode was seen as disposable. In the mid-1800s, Spode was arriving in such quantities at Fort Vancouver that it was just as easy to get a new piece as to repair your broken one, Langford said.
“When something broke, people just chose to buy replacements. That belies some of our assumptions about rough-and-ready living on the frontier, and having to make do with things you made and fixed yourself,” she said. “We find very few Spode pieces that were repaired.”
The modern American consumer practice of throwing stuff away and buying new stuff was already taking shape in the mid-1800s, she concluded.
“The sheer tonnage of goods being imported here was pretty amazing, and it shows how connected the fort was to Europe,” Langford said. “It shows how strong global trade networks were at the time.”
When the Hudson’s Bay Company eventually left the fort site and moved to Canada (in 1860), Langford added, lots more Spode was left behind in refuse pits. That trash has become archaeologists’ valuable treasure, as its unearthed Spode designs, colors, groupings and even food residues have yielded important evidence about the pieces’ manufacture, travels, value and uses — and about the lives and lifestyles (and diets) of the people who used them.
“There’s a lot of stuff that just got dumped, and that makes for a really good study collection,” Langford said.
