Pewter casters, ca. 1790. Gift of T.W. Clarke. Missouri History Museum.

Visitors who have enjoyed the Vatican Splendors exhibit at the Missouri History Museum may want to visit the current display in the Library and Research Center reading room, which features artifacts and documents related to Catholics in Missouri. Among the artifacts is a pair of pewter casters used during Mass at the first Catholic Church in New Madrid, Missouri.

St. Isidore Church in New Madrid was established in 1789, the same year the town was founded. In the 18th century, most people of European origin west of the Mississippi were Catholic, as that was the predominant religion in France and Spain. Although many of the settlers were of French or French Canadian origin, the region was technically administered by Spain because of the outcome of European wars.

As a non-Catholic, I learned about these Communion casters, or cruets, by reading the labels on similar pieces in the Vatican Splendors exhibit. The water and wine used in the Catholic Mass are kept in separate containers. If these containers are not glass, allowing the contents to be visible, they are usually marked with a “V” for wine and an “A” for water (for the Latin vino and aqua) so that the contents are not mixed up. One pair of fancy gilded casters in the Vatican Splendors exhibit bears symbols of a shell (water) and a bunch of grapes (wine). Elsewhere in the same gallery, another label about Communion equipment explains that the adding of two drops of water to the wine symbolizes the mingling of the human and the divine.

The pewter casters don’t bear a maker’s mark, which makes it difficult to determine their country of origin. Spain is known to have sent a great deal of ecclesiastical material to the New World. France is also a possible point of origin. They could have been made in French Canada. Or, it is even possible the casters were made locally in the Illinois Country, as the upper Mississippi Valley was then called.

—Anne Woodhouse, Curator of Domestic Life