Site:18QU28 - Bennett’s Point
Context: Early to mid-eighteenth-century trash pit
Date Range: Early to mid-eighteenth-century
Size: 37 mm diameter
Style: Armorial
Description:
Wine bottle seal molded with Armorial design of a shield with rampant lions, topped with bird standing on foliage. Initials CC flank the bird.
This bottle seal was almost certainly the property of Charles Carroll, chirurgeon, whose wife Dorothy née Blake is buried under a tomb carved with these same arms at Bennett's Point. The Carroll arms depict two lions supporting a vertical sword and the crest is a bird rising from the stump of a tree. Her grave contains the arms depicted in the photograph, which shows the Carroll arms are in the left half of the shield, with the arms of the Blake family in the other half (Joseph McMillan, "The Maryland Name and Arms Acts: Heraldic Law in the United States," The Coat of Arms 3d ser 8 (2012) 91-116).
These same arms were also used extensively by Dr. Carroll's son, Charles Carroll, Barrister.
Plantation owned by Richard Bennett III (planter, merchant, lawyer), occupied site between 1700 and 1749.