Restoring a table and room from 1770

What!?! No way!

A piece of the first perimeter lighting system makes way for discovery of an 18th century pool table.

I wonder what the best shot made on that table was? Were the cue sticks all wooden tipped, or did it transcend the era of leather tipped cues?

How cool! Thanks for sharing.
 
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Wow, they really spared no expense to restore that room and table. I wonder about what they were saying about chalk for the cue sticks though, I didn't think chalk became a thing until at least a century later.
 
Badpenguin said:
Wow, they really spared no expense to restore that room and table. I wonder about what they were saying about chalk for the cue sticks though, I didn't think chalk became a thing until at least a century later.
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I wasn't there, but reportedly players discovered about this time that the points of the cues would work better if they rubbed them into the ceiling plaster. Tips were still about 30 years away. The chalk holder was needed because the ceiling in that room is inconveniently high.
 
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Rusty in Montana said:
Very interesting post Bob thank you for sharing this with us !

I wonder what ever happened to the balls that went with the table ?
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If the balls were ivory, they would have wandered off for other purposes or cracked in a hundred years or so and then been reused. I wonder how long the table was used after the French revolution.
 
Rusty in Montana said:
I wonder if the balls could be made from mud ? Since I've heard that reference at times over the year's ?
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I think the alternative to ivory at the time was wood. "Mud" balls or "clay" balls I think were mostly Bakelite with minerals added, like this:

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Bob Jewett said:
I think the alternative to ivory at the time was wood. "Mud" balls or "clay" balls I think were mostly Bakelite with minerals added, like this:

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I lived in an antebellum home in about 60-62. No sign of a pool table but a handful of clay balls out in the grassless part of the yard. These were solid color, Apparently baked clay all the way through. I don't remember details well at the moment. Big chunks knocked out of them. This home was haunted and families moved through it rapidly so impossible to say what era or family the balls dated from. There was a huge loft/second floor but most of the floorboards weren't nailed down and exploration was risky to say the least! A huge patch in the ceiling where someone had broken through the ten or twelve foot ceiling and broken a hind leg.

I remember trying to find all of the balls but found less than a half dozen. I suspect earlier children had found a set and took them to play with. No sticks or table pieces ever turned up that I recall. The home burned later, I think the seventies.

The haunted house was an upgrade, I had lived in a slave cabin on our farm after our farmhouse burned! I was surprised to see the slave cabin had been drug out to the highway intersection and was being used as a little novelty shop not too long ago. I would have visited but it was closed when I went by.

Wouldn't swear to it but I have always thought that one phase of balls were ivory cue balls or billiard sets and clay balls. I noticed that they were killing 12,000 elephants a year for billiard balls when the search was launched for a substitute. Celluloid was the first substitute, I think it claimed a $10,000 prize. Minor detail, those balls literally exploded when hit too hard. I thought phenolic wasn't too far behind.

There were sets of mixed ivory and clay at one point, I think while the search for a plastic was on. I can't remember full sized wooden balls, some miniature toy balls that I ran across were wood.

All I know about the old balls and then some!

Hu
 
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