Three early types of spoons, slip-end, disk-end, and Puritan spoons, are known from Boston silversmiths working during the third quarter of the seventeenth century. The last, with its notched end, later evolved into the trifid handle on the example by Dummer owned by Bayou Bend. It is the earliest type to employ a rat tail on the underside of its bowl, an addition that ensured a stronger joint with the handle. Raised foliate decoration and engraved owner’s initials ornament the back. The trifid form remained popular at least through the first decade of the eighteenth century, when the wavy-end handle, a type not represented in the collection, began to replace it.

Technical notes: The results of a nondestructive energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence analysis are on file at Bayou Bend. 

Related examples: A slip-end Dummer spoon is published by Buhler and Hood 1970, vol. 1, p. 12, no. 7; and Puritan, trifid, and wavy-end types are in Buhler 1972, vol. 1, pp. 11, 16, 29, nos. 7, 13, 25. Other trifid-handle Dummer spoons are published in Buhler and Hood 1970, vol. 1, pp. 21, 25, nos. 12, 13, 17; Safford 1983, pp. 14, 18, nos. 16, 17; Ward and Hosley 1985, pp. 280–81, no. 162; Johnston 1994, p. 45; Quimby 1995, p. 92, no. 49.

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.