I found no example of this specific piece in my Internet search. It’s marked “sterling ssmc”. The mfg (Sterling Silver Manufacturing Company) is said to be from Providence RI, USA. Cira 1909 to 1932.
Features a man eating watermelon, corn cobs, and Old Kentucky Home scene in the bowl.
Anyone know how rare this piece is? And thoughts on demand/value?
I think it’s a souvenir spoon from My Old Kentucky Home state park in Kentucky and probably sold at the gift shop in Federal HIll, the old plantation mansion in the park that served as the possible inspiration for the Stephen Foster song. The date range you suggest seems right, and the style is pretty typical of souvenir spoons of the era. It’s probably fairly rare though I doubt that adds very much to the value and probably only to souvenir spoon collectors, or Stephen Foster collectors. It’s pretty cool though, and I love how it’s jammed with detail.
“Old Kentucky Home” teaspoons seems a popular theme for souvenir items just about the time roads were opening up and people were driving out-of-state for the first time.
Your spoon is rare enough I didn’t find an exact duplicate on the web but a common enough theme that, unless you can show limited edition status, it’s a collector’s item rather than anything more exotic!
Are you going to look for more? If so collections come up for auction sale and are probably the best way to buy.
CRWW
You may well be correct. If so why is the park commissioning an out-of-state spoon maker to make a Kentucky souvenir? I am afraid the answer to that question is the sellers have decided their buyer’s want something that says Kentucky on it rather than is actually made there.
And why a log cabin rather than the fine Georgian mansion which is actually. at the park?
The chances are Foster who composed the song never visited the house which was built by Judge Rowan with Lytle money. The park was named for Foster’s song but the song was inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s illustrations of – yes, a log cabin.
For a while the song itself was frowned upon for it use of racist terms like “darkies”.
Yes, you’re right, the song was inspired by Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I misremembered. But Foster’s connection with Federal Hill is with Judge Rowan who was his cousin, and according to Foster’s brother was a frequent visitor there, and what makes it a popular tourist destination in Kentucky (or did in the early part of the last century). As to why a Providence silver company made it, I can only say, I have 4 Mount Vernon spoons two from identical dies and all made in New York or New England. I guess then, as now, who ever bid the least for the tender got the contract.
I took this data from the University of Pittsburg’s collection.
"Stephen Foster was born, raised, and spent the majority of his adult life in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a child he visited Louisville and Augusta in Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio, and he attended boarding school in northern Pennsylvania. In the late 1840s he lived in Cincinnati, where he worked as a bookkeeper for his brother Dunning’s shipping business. From 1853 to 1854 and 1860 to 1864 he lived in the New York City area, presumably to be close to his publishers. The only documented trip to the South in adulthood was a month-long cruise down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans in 1852.
*'It is often said that the Rowan Family’s estate in Bardstown, Kentucky, where members of Foster’s family visited, is the old Kentucky home that inspired the song, but there is no definitive record that Foster ever visited there."
Wikipedia seems to adopt this position:
“Many of his songs had Southern themes, yet Foster never lived in the South and visited it only once, during his 1852 honeymoon. Available archival evidence does not suggest that Foster was an abolitionist.[12]”
CRWW
Interesting. Though Federal Hill certainly seems to claim him, but I won’t argue my corner any further, except to say if I had a cousin living in a swanky pad like Federal Hill, you’d never get rid of me.
