In the spring, Ashley Dumulong accidentally broke a delicate bowl, the exact size of her cupped hands. The bowl, specifically used to serve berries, is part of a set of fine china that has been in her family for over a century.
For a split second, she considered turning to eBay, in search of a replacement. But that felt like a betrayal.
Five generations of women in her family have owned the china with the laurel leaf pattern, and all but one woman in the line broke at least one item: Her great-great grandmother broke a teacup and carefully sealed it back together. When the lid of the butter dish broke, Ashley’s grandmother used a suture of Elmer’s Glue to mend it. The handle of the soup tureen was broken, and repaired, by Ashley’s mother.
For every chip, every break, the women put the dishes back together, dedicated to the stewardship of these objects. So with all the precision she could muster, Ashley put the berry bowl back together with super glue.
For over a century, this set of fine china has been handed down from woman to woman in the same family.
Josh Huskin for The New York Times
But she knows she is likely the last person in her family who will care about preserving the uninterrupted line of the 20-place set from one generation to the next. “I’m a mother of two boys,” says Ashley, 52, who keeps the china in boxes underneath a staircase in her home in San Antonio, Texas. “Neither of which is remotely interested.”
Walk into a thrift shop, and invariably you’ll find that the shelves are lined with fine china — saucers rising like miniature towers, gravy boats and platters crowding shelves and dainty teacups cradling dust.
Some antique dealers say that they don’t accept china anymore — it just doesn’t sell. The dishes are frequently one of the items left over at estate sales. Storage units and landfills are brimming with it.
Yet these objects — now discarded — were once somebody’s “good dishes.”
To look back at the trajectory of that broken teacup, butter dish and soup tureen is to look at the evolution of not just the way we eat, but the way we live. The way families acquired fancy dishes and the way in which they are now shedding them act as a cultural X-ray, revealing the hidden anatomy of how families bonded, how communities formed, the things we valued and the values we choose to impart.
“The popularity has plummeted — I don’t know a kinder word,” says David Lackey, who has been appraising china for “Antiques Roadshow” for nearly three decades. “Younger people are not interested.”
China Mania
On a crisp, spring day in 1906, when the S.S. Cymric arrived in Boston Harbor, Ashley’s great-great grandmother Laura Jane Briggs emerged from the stuffy, dark and overcrowded belly of the ship and emerged into a city, and a country, that had recently been gripped by china fever.
The S.S. Cymric arrived in Boston Harbor carrying Ashley’s great-great grandmother in 1906.
Library of Congress
Just in Boston, there were three dozen china and glassware factory showrooms, shops and storehouses.
American consumers were spending an average of 13 percent of their annual income on tableware, according to the research of the University of Leeds emeritus historian Regina Lee Blaszczyk.
That’s the equivalent of a family spending over $10,000 a year on dishes in today’s dollars.
But arriving in steerage, the lowest class of travel, Laura Jane was among those for whom pretty dishes were still out of reach. Born in 1876 in England, census records point to the difficult life she had endured up to this moment: When she was 8, her mother died. When she was 14, her father, a sailor, was lost at sea.
The children he left behind were so impoverished that his youngest daughter was placed in an orphanage, while Laura Jane went to work at the age of 15 as a cotton mill operator in Hull, a city in northeastern England, which had attracted a cotton yarn industry because of the large pool of women and children willing to work for cheap.
The manifest of the ship which brought her to the United States included a column which requested the following information about each passenger: “Whether in possession of $50, and if less, how much?” Laura Jane, traveling with her three children, 7-year-old twins and a toddler, had $10, poor even by the standards of the poorest passengers in the cheapest berth.
The ship’s manifest reveals that Laura Jane Briggs came to the United States in steerage.
The National Archives, via Ancestry.com
The family made its way to Ayer, Mass., a major railroad junction northeast of Boston, to rejoin Laura Jane’s husband, a railroad signalman, who had immigrated from England a few months earlier. They were never rich: Municipal records indicate that they lived in a rented house.
Yet Laura Jane acquired the Haviland & Company china likely in the 1910s, according to experts consulted on the pattern. Turn over any of the gold-ringed plates, and a stamp offers a clue to its significance: “Limoges,” it says.
Chinese porcelain, as the name implies, was first invented in China, but by the 19th century, one of its unrivaled capitals was the French town of Limoges, where large deposits of kaolin, the rare and precious white clay used to make porcelain, had been found.
As recently as the 1820s, as many as 20 percent of households in Washington had no utensils at all, suggesting that the family ate with their hands. Another 19 percent had no forks, according to a study of probate inventories, which listed every item owned by a deceased person.
While the wealthy ate out of separate dishes using their own cutlery, the masses ate out of communal vessels using their hands, or else with shared utensils.
The industrial revolution made it affordable to mass-produce these items, the start of a “one man, one spoon movement,” said University of Delaware professor emerita of history Katherine C. Grier.
What followed was an explosion in specialization: Not just a fork, but one used to carve out the flesh of a grapefruit.
By the 1880s, trade catalogs in the United States began advertising china cabinets. Soon, they were considered so essential that families that didn’t have one, were encouraged to D.I.Y. one, by removing the door from a closet and hanging a curtain which could be pulled back to show off the nice dishes.”
Architectural plan books began showing dining rooms, which were separate from the living room, by the late 19th century.
After her first husband died, Laura Jane remarried a man who was a police constable, and who owned his home. It was small, but it had a separate dining room.
By 1914, Laura Jane and her daughters began appearing in the society pages of the local newspaper. She was part of a committee that organized a “fine supper.” Her daughter performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the cornet. They competed in “whist,” a kind of card game.
And she became a suffragist, giving lectures and speeches in front of the railroad junction on women’s right to vote.
Of all the pieces that were eventually broken in the china set, the teacup has the most delicate seal. It looks like a hairline fracture, the kind that is so faint that only a seasoned surgeon might spot it on an X-ray. It’s the only item that was broken by Laura Jane and the care she took to repair it is a hint of what these objects meant to her.
Look carefully to see the hairline fracture in the middle of this teacup, broken and repaired by Ashley’s great-great grandmother.
Scott Ball for The New York Times
Already, in the 1920s, when she passed it on to her daughter on the occasion of her wedding, fine china was entering a downward spiral. But the aspirational quality that the china represented continued for decades, helped by marketing strategies, which positioned fancy dishes as a symbol of status and accomplishment. The first person to inherit the china was Laura Jane’s eldest daughter Gigi — one of the twin girls who held her hand in steerage when they made their way across the Atlantic Ocean.
She moved with it to Connecticut in 1921, and she is the only woman in the line who didn’t break anything — possibly because she didn’t have it for very long. A year or so later, Gigi returned to her mother’s home with the china and her baby daughter, abandoning both there. She had discovered that her wedding ring was missing. Her husband had used it to propose to another woman.
At a time when divorce was rare, Gigi demanded one. “You are now free to peruse the marital waters, should you feel you have the courage to do so,” read the letter from her ex-husband’s lawyer, which her great-granddaughter, Ashley, later found.
Women’s roles were changing. Soon they could divorce with ease. Moving was also more common. Gigi’s daughter, Marilynn Buckingham, inherited the set of china, and took it with her when she followed her own husband across the country to Texas in the late 1940s, where they moved into a ranch-style home in the town of Arlington. When she broke the lid of the butter dish, she tried fixing it with a thick zigzag of glue.
Dining was becoming less and less formal. Buffets were in vogue, so were eating in a kitchen nook, eating on paper plates and eating on a TV tray.
As plumbing and electricity became widespread, homes became more expensive to build. Families moved into smaller spaces. “Crockery and Glass Journal” announced in 1927 that there was a demand for “shorter sets,” serving just six people.
During the Great Depression, Lenox China agreed to sell its patterns by the place setting rather than by the dozen. Stores introduced layaway, one of several systems of credit created to shore up flagging sales.
Eating habits were changing. People had less time to cook. When a women’s club in Muncie, Indiana, dedicated a program to the question: “Shall a Conscientious Housewife Use Canned Foods?” the consensus was, ‘Yes.’”
Between 1947 and 1961, production at American pottery factories fell by half and at least 15 factories filed for bankruptcy, according to the research of historian Regina Lee Blaszczyk.
In the 1950s, as women entered the work force, Lenox China began a campaign in “Seventeen” magazine, targeting teenage girls. “You get the license, I’ll get the Lenox,” went one slogan.
By the late 1960s, the bridal market accounted for 64 percent of all fine china sold in the United States, according to Charles L. Venable, co-author of “China and Glass in America.”
That market has all but dried up. Just 11 percent of couples registered for fine china this year, down by more than half, from 26 percent a decade ago, according to the Knot, a wedding planning site. Couples now seek out appliances, or experiences, like canoes, ski boots and supplies for an outdoor adventure.
Ashley’s first memory of the dishes dates back to when she was 4, maybe 5, and her mother dropped her off at Marilynn’s house on weekends. Marilynn entertained her granddaughter by throwing lavish tea parties, using the beautiful plates to serve dainty sandwiches. After tea, she sat her grandchild on her lap and they waited for the cuckoo clock to chime.
As soon as it did, she delighted her granddaughter by rewinding the clock’s hands and letting it chime again.
She regaled the little girl with stories about Laura Jane’s journey to the United States.
Ashley Dumulong poses with china that was passed down to her from her great-great grandmother.
Josh Huskin for The New York Times
By the time Ashley was in college in the 1990s, the handle of the soup tureen fell off — her mother, Carol, broke it in the kitchen. It was later repaired.
Marilynn, who had a heart condition, died in 1999, and Ashley, who had gotten married weeks earlier, inherited the china.
She put it in the closet under the stairs.
She became the vice president of a local bank, in charge of community relations. She helped organize an event in the summer of 2020 that recognized the 100-year anniversary of the 19th amendment by tying white ribbons to trees along the San Antonio river walk. It was the middle of the pandemic and stuck at home, Ashley had begun researching her mother’s line on Ancestry.com, discovering the ship manifest which listed Laura Jane’s name as well as yellowing newspaper articles about her role as a suffragist.
The zigzag along the top of this butter dish marks where Ashley’s grandmother glued the broken dish together.
Scott Ball for The New York Times
She realized that the china was a symbol: “It was a way to say she had escaped her circumstances.”
Lately, she has tried to share this history with her sons. But if acquiring the collection of fancy dishes had marked a sign of progress for her foremothers, to her sons, letting go of it, is a sign of a different kind of progress.
Nicolas (left) and Benjamin Dumulong (right) are next in line to inherit the china.
Josh Huskin for The New York Times
An apprentice mechanic, 21-year-old Nicolas Dumulong, often comes home with hands so greasy, he worries about touching his white keyboard, much less the fine china.
“I never met my great-grandmother. I never met my grandmother,” said Nicolas Dumulong. “So the only connection I have to that china is my mother,” he said, adding: “I feel like traditions come and go. I respect that it means, you know, as much as it does to her. And I enjoy that my mother has something to treasure her lost family members with. But it’s not something that I see myself doing.”
So the question for Ashley is how Laura Jane will be remembered now. A single picture has survived of Laura Jane, her hair pulled back in a wispy bun, a string of pearls lying limply around her neck.
