The houses in colonial America were built by local hands, but with hardware from somewhere else.
According to multiple maritime histories, nearly every manufactured item in a colonial household arrived by ship. The cast-iron nails holding the timbers together came from English forges. The window glass came from English glassworks. The tools that shaped the wood, saws, planes, hammer heads, augers, came in crates from Sheffield and Birmingham.
So did the rest of daily life. According to Connecticut History, country stores stocked English cloth, iron, glass, and crockery alongside East Indian silk, tea, and spices, and West Indian sugar, molasses, rum, salt, fruit, and coffee. A colonial pantry was a small map of the world.
The luxuries traveled the same routes. According to Smarthistory, the silver tea service that signaled wealth in a Boston parlor was assembled from imported parts: Chinese tea, Caribbean sugar, English silver, and porcelain shaped after Chinese rice bowls. Madeira wine, a favorite of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, came from a Portuguese island in the eastern Atlantic.
Even the rebellion came by ship. According to the Progressive Policy Institute, the tea dumped into Boston Harbor in December 1773 had been purchased in Guangzhou, China, two years earlier and shipped halfway around the world before three dozen Sons of Liberty heaved it overboard.
When the tall ships sail past the Statue of Liberty this July, they will be honoring the vessels that built American homes, one nail at a time.
