Casement window glass fragments of dark olive-green window glass that were cut into geometric shapes for use in multi-paned casement windows. Each pane was held in place by strips of lead window came.

Material – Glass

Place of Origin – Unknown, likely England

Glazed windows were commonly used in English homes after the last quarter of the sixteenth century.[i] Seventeenth century wealthy homes tended to have a greater number of hearths and windows.[ii] Improvements to window and fireplace designs during the seventeenth century increased ventilation and reduced the risk of fires making attached kitchens safer.[iii] Although windows were common in England, many of the colonial homes in the Atlantic North America in the early seventeenth century did not have glazed windows[iv]

The earliest evidence of window glass production in North America comes from the first glassworks in Jamestown c.1608. Most glassworks were short lived due to a lack of skilled laborers and prior to the American Revolution most of the window glass was imported from England. Both crown and broad window glass have been identified on seventeenth century sites along the Atlantic coast.[v] Casement windows have been recovered archaeologically in the early colonial homes in Connecticut and the Chesapeake.[vi] A 1656 account by colonist John Hammond reports that more affluent farmsteads in Virginia and Maryland had homes with glazed windows and white-limed walls.[vii] Casement windows continued to be used until the mid-eighteenth century and saw a revival in the early twentieth century with the Gothic Revival movement.[viii]

At least one of the brick buildings on the private town lots at c.1670-1690s Charles Towne had hinged, multi-paned glass casement windows. Similar to the affluent homes in Virginia and Maryland, this building also had white-lime plastered walls. The glass panes are a dark olive-green color and were cut into a variety of geometric shapes. The olive-green hue occurs naturally when the sands used to make the glass have a high iron content. The Charles Towne casement window glass is too fragmentary to reconstruct the layout or design of the window. These fragments are also too vitrified or deteriorated to identify the manufacturing technique – either broad or crown. The individual window panes were held in place by milled H-shaped lead window cames.[ix] The presence of window glass in the early colony signifies the affluence of the urban landowners in the first town settlement and reflects English architectural styles and urban development.

[i] John Woodforde, The Truth about Cottages (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, UK, 1979), 85.

[ii] James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 1994), 299.

[iii] Sara Pennell, The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600-1850 (Bloomsbury Academic, London, UK, 2016), 47-48; H.J. Louw, the Origin of the Sash Window Architectural History 26:49-72,144-150.

[iv] Fiske Kimball, Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, NY, 1922), 27.

[v] The Corning Museum of Glass, Glass From the Corning Museum of Glass: A Guide to the Collections (The Corning Museum of Glass, New York, NY, 1974), 85; John L. Cotter and J. Paul Hudson, New Discoveries at Jamestown: Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America (National Park Service, Washington D.C., 1957), 21; Fiske “Domestic Architecture”, 27; Gerard P. Scharfenberger, Recent Evidence for Broad Window Glass in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century America. Historical Archaeology 38(4):59-60.

[vi] Ross K. Harper, “Their Houses are Ancient and Ordinary”: Archaeology and Connecticut’s Eighteenth Century Domestic Architecture Historical Archaeology 46(4):17; William M. Kelso, Kingsmill Plantations, 1619-1800: Archaeology of Country Life in Colonial Virginia (Academic Press, Inc., Orlando, FL 1984), 79,169; Jason D. Moser, Al Luckenback, Sherri M. Marsh and Donna Ware, Impermanent Architecture in a Less Permanent Town: The Mid-Seventeenth Century Architecture of Providence, Maryland, Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 9:200,207,208.

[vii] Cary Carson, Norman F. Barka, William M. Kelso, Garry Wheeler Stone, and Dell Upton, Impermanent Architecture in the Southern American Colonies Winterthur Portfolio 16(2/3):144.

[viii] Harold Donaldson Eberlein, Two Aspects of the Casement Window: Practical and Decorative Considerations. Arts & Decoration 5(11):423; Harper, “Their Houses are Ancient”, 17,41; Kimball, “Domestic Architecture”, 27-28.

[ix] Geoff Egan, Medieval Finds From Excavations in London: 6 The Medieval Household: Daily Living c.1150-1450. (Boydell Press, Suffolk, UK, 2010), 52.