The photograph shows the eighty-eight-year-old Eveline Sherburne seated in the parlor of the Warner House, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, around 1927 (fig. 1). She and her nephew, only seven years younger, were the last family descendants living in the 1716–1718 house. After their deaths in 1929 and 1930, it was sold by their heirs and became the Warner House Association, opening to the public as a historic property in 1932.
In front of Miss Sherburne is a card table with a punch pot prominently placed at its center (fig. 2). The 1930 probate inventory lists the piece as “1 Terra Cotta Tea Pot, grapevine band, and cover.” As we were interpreting the parlor to the period of 1900 to 1930, we were anxious to find this pot, or a close duplicate, to display there. We broadcast our search in several ways, and one resulted in success. Carl Crossman, a good friend of the Warner House, was shown the archival photograph and, with his amazing visual memory, reported to us in February 2000 that he had seen a very similar example in a dealer’s shop. We contacted the dealer; he sent photographs, we agreed on the price, and the punch pot (fig. 3) is now happily residing on the correct table (another recent purchase) in the parlor. The match is not exact, but certainly close enough to meet our constant attempts to be historically accurate.
