Description:

Good American Coin Silver Tea Set, William R. Eaton, John Gordon and William Bogert for Ball, Black and Co. (1856-1860, Newburgh, New York), dated June 24, 1858 and monogrammed "M.C.B" for Margaret Cyrilla (Brownson) Bisland (1839-1906), mistress of Fairfax Plantation, St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, incl. hot water urn, approx. h. 16 in.; teapot, approx. h. 11 in.; cream jug, approx. h. 16 in.; covered sugar bowl, approx. h. 9 1/2 in.; and waste bowl, approx. h. 5 3/4 in., each of slightly concave paneled ovoid form decorated with engraved rococo scrolls below morning glories, the whole with milled anthemion banding, lidded elements with cast and applied floral finials and crested handles; together with an associated English silverplate tray, approx. l. 30 1/2 in., approx. w. 20 1/2 in. (6 pcs.) Provenance: Descended in the Bisland family; to the Terrebonne Historical and Cultural Society; New Orleans private collection. Note: Margaret Cyrilla Brownson was born on September 30, 1839 in Brooklyn, New York, to Judge John Brownson and his wife, the former Caroline Penn Stelle. Although born in Brooklyn, she was of most decidedly Southern ancestry; her maternal grandmother and namesake was Margaret Cyrilla Watts (1775-1829) of Natchez, the wife of Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, Spanish governor of the Natchez district (1787-1797) and Louisiana (1797-1799). Margaret Brownson married Thomas Shields Bisland (1837-1909), a Natchez planter, in New York on June 24, 1858: the date inscribed on this set and doubtless the occasion of its presentation. (Six years earlier, her elder sister, Frances Ashton Bisland, had married Bisland's elder brother, John Rucker Bisland.) Thomas and Margaret moved to Fairfax Plantation in St. Mary Parish, a sugar concern formerly the property of Louisiana governor Joshua Baker (whose daughter had married yet a third Bisland brother). The 1860 census shows them to be a prosperous family, their worth recorded as $210,000. They had two surviving children before the start of the Civil War, in which Thomas served as quartermaster in the 26th Louisiana Infantry and later surgeon (he had been a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania before deciding to pursue the family planting business). Margaret Bisland and her children fled Fairfax, known as Camp Bisland during the war, before the April 12-13, 1863 Battle of Bisland. (The traditional shibboleth of southern silver being buried to protect it from the Yankees seems plausible here; Margaret and her children escaped to Natchez in an army ambulance, and although the camp was successfully defended, the battle raged even into the house itself!) After the war, Thomas and Margaret returned to a difficult life in Reconstruction Louisiana before inheriting the Bisland's Natchez property upon the death of Thomas' mother in 1873. There, Margaret supplemented the family's modest income composing piano works and writing poetry for the New Orleans Times-Democrat. She was known as "a woman of marked beauty and decided literary ability which under different circumstances might have brought her prominently into the world of letters." One of her poems, "Marguerite", was included in the anthology In My Lady's Name: Poems of Love and Beauty (New York: Putnam's, 1897). She died on January 7, 1906, pre-deceasing her husband by two years. A child of the couple, Elizabeth Ker (Bisland) Wetmore (1861-1929), would herself become a woman of letters, noted as a journalist and biographer of Lafcadio Hearn.

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