James E. Birch

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James E. Birch Silver Collection

(This article first appeared in Silver Magazine, September/October 1992 (Volume XXV, Number V) pp. 20-25 and is reprinted with the permission of Silver Magazine.)

The Central America

Photographs by Colin McRae

click on photos in the text to enlarge to see details

A surprisingly little known but splendid and historically important and fascinating collection of sterling silver made for Tiffany & Company by the firm of John Chandler Moore and Edward C. Moore in 1854-55 is kept in the Hearst Memorial Mining Building, University of California at Berkeley. As only a few pieces of the James E. Birch Collection have been published previously, the purpose of these articles is to offer for the first time photographs of the entire 26 piece collection, together with little known background material on the amazing James E. Birch and his silver.

It is entirely fitting that mining and stagecoach scenes comprise the two major themes of the engraving and repoussé decoration on the silver made especially for James E. Birch. In 1849, Birch, a stagecoach driver in Providence, Rhode Island, and his fiancée Julia Ann Briggs Chace decided that they wanted to live in a mansion in the bride’s native Swansea, Massachusetts, with servants and all the finer things of life. Since this dream was not attainable in his present circumstances, Birch, a very enterprising 21 year old, decided to join the stampede for Gold Rush California. Although gold was discovered near Sutter’s Mill in the California foothills of the Sierra Nevada in January of 1848, the news was not publicized on the East Coast until the New York Herald published a letter on August 19, 1848, setting forth the view that the creeks of California were flowing with gold. James E. Birch sailed for California on the steamship Crescent City on December 23, 1848, along with more than 100 other feverish entrepreneurs.

In the spring he arrived in Sacramento City which was fast becoming the supply center for the mining region, as well as the starting point for the thousands of prospectors heading for the fields, some by horseback, most by foot. Prices for land, goods and services were high and climbing daily. Instead of heading for the gold fields like everybody else, Birch shrewdly was determined to start a stagecoach business to provide transportation to the various mining areas, as well as mail delivery to the prospectors in outlying spots. Previously, most mail for the miners had been held in San Francisco until it was personally picked up by the miners, a system which was satisfactory.

Initially, Birch himself drove the stage, which was an inglorious old ranch wagon he had picked up, and hauled the prospectors from Sacramento City to Coloma, in the rugged foothills of the Sierra Nevada and to points between, including “Sutter’s Fort,” not a military fort but a trading post and resting/relay station built by German immigrant John Sutter, and Sutter’s Mill, a sawmill built by Sutter near Coloma. Birch charged 2 ounces of gold (about $32 in 1849) each way for the 50 mile trip at a speed of 10-12 miles per hour. Miners were in a great hurry to reach each new mining area as it opened up, and then claims were staked and one area became saturated, Birch was very adept at forecasting where the next important area would be and at quickly providing service there. For the first several months Birch had a partner, Charles F. Davenport, a close friend and former owner of a stage company in Rhode Island who had made the California trip with Birch, but by August of 1849 Birch had bought out Davenport and become sole owner of the enterprise. An advertisement was placed in Sacramento’s Placer Times on August 18, 1849, announcing the dissolution of presenting James E. Birch as the sole proprietor. By the spring of 1850, Birch was no longer driving stage himself and, leaving the driving to his employees, he turned his full attention to managing the business. With the arrival of a fleet of top-of-the-line stagecoaches which he had ordered from the East, his firm became the envy of all others. Although business was sometimes adversely affected by the rather frequent highway robberies at the hands of brigands, and periods of terrible weather sometimes forced the shutdown of some lines for a time, expansion followed expansion, an before the end of 1851 he was providing service to all the northern and southern (east from Stockton) mining areas.

At this point Birch returned to Swansea where he arranged for and oversaw the building of an immense and stately mansion using some of his acquired wealth, and on September 12, 1852, he and Julia Chace were married and set up housekeeping on their new estate. In March of 1853, James Birch returned to California to continue his business interests. Since he first started his business he had made good use of advertising in the two Sacramento newspapers and elsewhere, and with his outgoing personality and obvious business acumen, he made himself a very popular figure of the time, receiving many glowingly favorable editorial mentions in newspapers both in California an on the East Coast. His method was to sell off lines to areas which were about to become played out an use the profits to start new more promising lines. In the face of increased competition, he lowered fares in a timely manner, and by the end of 1853 was so successful that he and others formed the California Stage Company with Birch as president, and his good friend Frank Shaw Stevens as vice-president. Birch and Stevens had originally met in Providence where Stevens was a store clerk. Stevens eventually had both California and East Coast business interests, including a wholesale liquor business in New York City. The California Stage Company, incorporated with a value of $1 million at $1000 per share had about 80 per cent of the stage business in the state, and paid frequent dividends.

In March of 1854 his business was going so well Birch took the time for a brief trip back east. By the fall of 1854, the California Stage Company provided service to almost all northern and central California including non-mining areas, as well as to Los Angeles. In February of 1855 Birch withdrew as president of the company, though remaining its largest stockholder, and returned to the East for about a two year stay during which he spent his time lobbying for national mail contracts for the company as well as in lavish entertaining at the mansion in Swansea. It was probably at this time (or possibly during the brief late 1854 trip) that he paid a visit to Tiffany’s in New York and ordered his silver service.

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The bequest which left this collection to the University listed the pieces as follows: a coffee pot, tea-pot, tea-kettle, sugar bowl. Cream pitcher, slop-bowl, ice-pitcher, large pitcher, small waiter, large waiter, two large goblets, two gravy boats, celery goblet, fruit dish, soup-tureen, cake basket, cake knife, ice dish, ice tongs, two sauce tureens with covers, and two ladles. At present no records from the Moore firm have been found relating to the Birch silver service. Indeed, except for a few of Edward Moore’s sketchbooks from 1855, few records of any kind are currently known relating to the Moore firm in this period.

click on image to enlarge

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Some information can be gleaned from the silver itself. Except when otherwise noted all hollowware pieces carry the Tiffany, Young & Ellis mark shown here, in use in 1854-55, as well as design and order numbers, and the two Old English M’s for John Chandler Moore and Edward C. Moore, the latter of whom was in charge of the Moore firm by this time. The pieces, most of which are rococo in spirit and many of which have a monumental, sculptural quality appearing to be much heavier in weight than they actually are, present scenes of miners performing their tasks, stagecoaches rushing on their way, and views of places important to Birch and to the mining industry.

Large waiter

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small waiter

Water pitcher

The large and imposing celery goblet with beaded rim presents another aspect of Birch’s business – a stage team feeding in one of the many stables which Birch had established along his routes. The dramatic tea server, with a richly detailed scene of a stagecoach rushing through the foothills, has a whimsically interpreted miner panning for gold as a finial, as does the coffee server with a cartouche presenting a prospector who appears to be posing for the viewer by a tree. Both of the elegant gravy boats, thickly beaded around the rims of the bowls and feet, present rather lonesome and forlorn looking prospectors. The covered ice pitcher and the fruit dish or compote are two of the few pieces in the collection which depict no California scenes; they are typical Moore pieces of the period.

Fruit dish (compote)

Tea kettle on stand

Sugar bowl

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Cream pitcher

The double-handled sugar bowl, with another miner panning as finial, has a lovely, tranquil scene of a horse feeding by a tree near a cottage, probably a stage relay station, while the covered creamer has an interesting finial of grape leaves and a cartouche showing a prospector carrying the tools of the trade on his way to his claim.

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PART II

This article first appeared in Silver Magazine, November/December 1992 (Volume XXV, Number VI) pp. 10-15 and is reprinted with the permission of Silver Magazine.

When the firm of John Chandler Moore and Edward C. Moore made the James E. Birch silver service for Tiffany & Company in 1854-55 they, being New Yorkers far from California, would have needed some sort of prototypes to use for the cartouche designs which depicted California subjects and scenes with great accuracy and detail. Probable sources are the California pictorial letter sheets common at the time. Sheets of paper with lithographed black and white or color scenes were folded up, addressed and sent through the mail much like today’s aerogrammes. Made for hotels and many other types of businesses, they usually served as advertisements for California in general rather than for specific products or firms. Sometimes whimsical stories or historical information, some instances lengthy, were printed in very small type below the pictorial representations. Common themes were every sort of mining scene from the large mines to depictions of individual prospectors whom Birch served, stagecoaches, wilderness illustrations, cities (San Francisco being a favorite subject), and animals (particularly scenes involving prospectors dealing with bears in the wild). Many of the pictorials reflect a whimsical quality also felt in the engravings on the Birch silver. An examination of large numbers of pictorials letter sheets of the period shows no evidence that the Moore firm literally copied any particular one, but the Moore designs are close in spirit to those on many of them. The pictorial of Sutter’s Fort particularly recalls the representation of that location on the large waiter shown in part one.

Sunflowers, wildflowers, scrolls, bears, grape vines, grape leaves, and bunches of grapes dominate the ornamentation outside the cartouches on the Birch silver. Most handles are carefully delineated and varied grape vines, both gnarled older vines and tender young ones. Two striking covered sauce tureens are topped with a bear in motion as finial as well as having bear's head handles with rings clenched in their mouths and finely detailed teeth, and wilderness cartouches with prospector locales.

Sauce Tureen

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slop bowl (or bone bowl)

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Soup tureen

The lovely slop bowl (used to discard the tea that has grown cold in the cups so that fresh hot tea can be poured) has a cartouche showing a giant sized prospector in the act of swinging his pick in a sort of fish-eye lens view of a landscape. The soup tureen again has the cast and applied bear's head handles, while its lid has a wide stagecoach landscape and , a particularly whimsical touch, an exquisite detailed stagecoach finial that actually rocks back and forth.

 

Cake basket

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The elegant cake basket with beaded rim on both bowl and foot, has the upper torsos and heads of four moving horses, two on each side, arising fromthe rococo ornamentation; between the horses on each side is a small cartouche, presenting a wilderness scene on one side, and the Birch JEB script monogram on the other.

The ice dish, although it has no California decoration, is quite a striking piece. It's ornament is somewhat reminiscent of that on the Oriental pattern flatware and has a frozen, icy look, much like an ice sculpture. With large beads rimming the bowl and foot, the piece also has a drainer insert.

Ice dish

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flatware

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Four pieces of flatware are part of the collection, made by the brilliant New York silversmith Henry Hebbard in coin silver in the Oriental pattern point-patented by Hebbard and John Polhamus in 1855 but made beginning in 1853. It has often been wondered why these four pieces from the extensive Birch family flatware service in "Oriental" were selected to be part of the collection donated to the University. The wording of the bequest provides the answer, "...cake basket, cake knife, ice dish, ice tongs, two sauce tureens with covers and two ladles." In other words, these flatware pieces were included to accompany the specific holloware to which their use was essential. Tiffany sold a great amount of flatware in this pattern with Hebbard & Co. marks as well as John Polhamus marks.

wine goblet (one of two)

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Water pitcher

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While James Birch was in the East in 1856 a son, Frank Stevens Birch, named after Birch's best friend, was born to the Birches. During this period Birch divided his time between Swansea, where he and his wife entertained lavishly, and Wasington, D.C., where he lobbied certain legislators, such as his friend William M. Gwin, one of the first two U.S. Senators from California, in his attempt to obtain the contract for coast-to-coast mail service. Although the largest contracts were given to a southern Democrat by the newly elected President Buchanan, Birch did obtain the rights to the route from San Antonio, Texas to San Diego, California. Returning to California in the summer of 1857, Birch worked on consolidation of his interests as well as setting up this new line. According to an article in the Sacramento Daily Union on June 13, 1857, Birch's California Stage Company had just become the first stage company to provide service all the way across the extremely rugged Sierra Nevada, no small feat.

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The Central America
(click here and here and here for more sites devoted to the treasures of the S.S. Cental America

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On August 20, 1857, heading for New York to set up his new national office, he sailed from San Francisco to Panama, took a train across the Isthmus, and sailed for New York on the paddle steamer Central America. After a stop in Havana, the ship was caught in a hurricane and, after floundering for several days, sank on September 12, 1857, carrying an immense load of gold bars and coins valued at about $1.2 million at the time.

Many of the passengers managed to reach lifeboats and were later rescued, but James Birch was not among them. The tenacious Birch was one of the number of survivors clinging to a piece of the shlp's wreckage, tossed about in stormy seas for days, cold and hungry, with little water. Most died of exposure or, like James Birch, were swept away to their deaths with only three men ultimately surviving. Their survival is due in part to the fact that Birch had managed to keep with him a lovely silver cup given to him by his superintendent, John Andrews, as a gift for Birch's baby and engraved "John to Frank".

George Dawson, to whom Birch gave the cup before he died, used it to collect rain water for drinking and thus was able to survive until rescued. He later presented the cup to Birch's grateful widow who gave him a reward.

The cup, not a Tiffany/Moore piece, is marked "TUCKER SAN FRANCISCO." J.W. Tucker, a San Francisco jeweler and watchmaker is known to have made only a few pieces of silver and to have bought unmarked pieces, particularly from Gorham, and place his own retail stamp on them, so that this cup is likely by Gorham or some other silver manufacturer.

Silver baby cup

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In 1986, the remains of the Central America were located about 200 miles off the coast of South Carolina, and by 1989, after much litigation about rights to the proceeds, much of the gold and other cargo, now valued at up to $1 billion, was being recovered by a salvage consortium. As of September, 1992 litigation continues, as insurance companies who report that they paid claims on the sinking of the ship in the 1850s are seeking a portion of the valuable cargo. It is not known what property James Birch may have had with him on the ship. (update- Associated Press article from the year 2001)

A monument was erected near the Stevens family tomb in the cemetery in Swansea Village reading:

James E. Birch
Born Nov. 30, 1827
Was Lost With
The Ill Fated
Steamship
Central America
Sept. 12, 1857

"No dust have I to cover me
My grave no man may show;
My tomb is this unending sea,
And I lie far below.
My fate, O stranger, was to
drown;
And where it was the ship
Went down,
Is what the sea-birds know."

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The sinking of the Cental America was one of the top stories nationwide in newspapers of 1857-58. Countless interviews with many of the several hundred survivors were published, and James Birch was a main focus of the often contradictory stories. An East Coast newspaper published a tale that Birch missed his chance to get in a lifeboat because he decided to retire to his stateroom to change his clothes while the last lifeboat left. This enraged a writer for the Sacramento Daily Union who stated that no one could be less of a dandy than the forthright Birch and that the story must be false. Another report in the Evening Bulletin of San Francisco on October 24, 1857, highly praised Birch's courage for refusing an offer of a life preserver on the basis that it would be pointless to expose himself to the cold sea where he could not survive and that he preferred to simply go down with the ship. The most curious is one which has Birch calmly smoking a cigar on deck, in an elegant pose with a smile on his face as the ship went down.

Early in 1858 his widow, Julia Ann Briggs Chace Birch, traveled to California to settle his affairs. There she met Birch's good friend Frank Shaw Stevens and married him in July of that year. They arrived back in Massachusetts on December 25 and lived in the Birch mansion in Swansea. Julia legally turned over control of Birch's estate to Stevens, who was president of the California Stage Company for some years, dividing his time between California and Massachusetts. After Julia died in 1871, Stevens married Elizabeth Richmond Case who long outlived her older husband. Frank Stevens died on April 25,1898, leaving an estate estimated at over $1 million, but which may have been much larger, as his will forbade the release of appraisal information.

Steven's stepson Frank died in 1896 with no surviving children. Elizabeth Richmond Case Stevens remained in the Swansea mansion, and though she had never met James E. Birch, the words of her will indicate that she had a profound respect for the man and a deep appreciation for the Birch silver service. In 1921, Elizabeth, acting through her attorneys, had made arrangements with the Hearst School of Mining at the University of California at Berkeley for the housing of the silver collection to be bequeathed to the University at a later time.

When Elizabeth Stevens died on February 14, 1930, with an estate appraised at nearly $7 million, she left a lifetime interest in the silver to her sister and specified that the silver would go the University upon the sister's death. In a separate codicil, the University was bequeathed this baby cup, to which, after the death of James E. Birch, the following inscription was added, "Saved from the Steamer Central American Lost Sep. 12, 1857."

The University received the the collection in 1935, and for the first time the silver, which had remained in the family mansion since the death of James Birch, became available for public viewing.

There are a number of reasons why it is probable that the present collection at the University is not the entire Birch collection. First, wording of the will leaves the impression that a representative selection rather than the whole collection was bequeathed to the University. Second, the collection is missing many pieces one would expect to see a service made in that period for a very wealthy family who did extensive entertaining in their home. Third, some of the pieces are present in unlikely numbers or are missing companion pieces, such as only two wine goblets, only one celery goblet, and no salvers for the gravy boats. Additionally, the rest of the flatware service in the Hebbard/Polhamus Oriental pattern is obviously missing. The ultimate disposition of the remainder of the service is not known. Readers who own Moore/Tiffany holloware of the period with the Tiffany, Young & Ellis mark should look for the script "JEB" monogram which can be seen in some of the photographs in this article, and readers who own flatware in the Oriental pattern should check for the script "BIRCH" monogram and the mark "H.H. & CO. PATENT 1855 TIFFANY & CO." It is possible that some readers may own pieces of the important James E. Birch collection without realizing it!

Author’s note: Thanks to the Department of Materials Science and Mineral Engineering, University of California at Berkeley, and special thanks to Judy Roberts, Manager of the Department and administrator of the James E. Birch Collection.

(Note from the department of Materials Science and Engineering: Judy Roberts, Manager for the Department of Materials Science and Engineering retired after 41 years of excellent leadership and service in December of 2002. Among other things the department is indebted to her for compiling and maintaining the historical records of this silver collection.)

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