"This strange spirit of procrastination": Alcohol and medicine at Charles Carroll Jr.’s Homewood

Summary

Using historical and archaeological sources focused on medicine and alcohol use at Homewood in Baltimore, Maryland, this paper tells a multi-layered story of the final years of Charles Carroll Jr.  Following the completion of his house in 1806, Carroll, son of a Maryland signatory of the Declaration of Independence, began a long descent into alcoholism; by 1814, it had fully taken hold of him. He died nearly a decade later. This is also a story about the effects of national trade restrictions from 1806 to 1812 and eventual war with Britain, on a household with a distinctively British taste. No other good played as an important role in expressing these events than alcohol. Evidence is drawn from detailed inventories and notes taken by the Carrolls, and an analysis of glass and ceramic artifacts that were recovered from the site in archaeological excavations of 1983 and from fill contexts in 2017.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From Pages to Pits: Using Texts and Archaeological Evidence to Examine Interconnected Trading Networks in the mid-Atlantic   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 1021