The Bartlett Fireback
Dated 1660, the Bartlett fireback at Pilgrim Hall Museum preserves a substantial piece of an early Plymouth household. Its raised decoration and prominent numerals made it both a useful fireplace fitting and an ornament within the home.
A fireback stood against the rear wall of a fireplace, protecting the masonry from direct heat and reflecting some warmth into the room. In a household dependent on wood fires, this heavy iron plate served a practical purpose through repeated seasons of use.
The museum’s fireback came from the home of Joseph Bartlett in Manomet, now part of Plymouth. Joseph was the son of Robert Bartlett, who arrived aboard the Anne in 1623, and Mary Warren Bartlett, whose father, Richard Warren, had traveled on the Mayflower.
An older inscription mounted around the object describes it as an English import. Later scholarship attributes it to the Saugus Iron Works in Massachusetts. That distinction changes its significance: the fireback offers evidence of skilled iron production within seventeenth-century New England.
Its decoration also connects metalworking with other household crafts. Raised rounded forms and spindle-like ornaments resemble details applied to wooden furniture of the period. Such patterns could be transferred into a sand mold and reproduced in cast iron.
The date places the object within the lives of Plymouth’s second generation, forty years after the Mayflower’s arrival. By then, families were establishing households whose furnishings combined everyday needs with craftsmanship and personal taste.
Preserved beyond the hearth it once served, the Bartlett fireback connects family history with domestic life and early industry. Its survival allows an ordinary household necessity to tell a broader story about the community taking shape around it.
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