Colonial American Silversmithing: Paul Revere and the Roots of US Silver

If you went looking for the single most American piece of silver ever made, you’d probably end up in the basement of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. They have, in a glass case under controlled humidity, a silver punch bowl about eight inches across. It’s called the Sons of Liberty Bowl, and Paul Revere made it in 1768. The bowl has the names of 15 members of the Sons of Liberty—the political club that organized resistance to British taxation—engraved around the rim. John Hancock, John Adams, and others. It is, on one level, a piece of tableware. On another level, it’s a document of the American Revolution, hand-raised in sterling silver, paid for in the equivalent of about two months’ wages for a skilled worker.

That bowl is the right place to start a history of American silversmithing, because the craft in this country was never just about the metal. The smiths who set up shop in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston in the 1600s and 1700s were making objects, but they were also building an industry, a social class, and a political network. Paul Revere is the most famous of them, and he’s famous for reasons that go beyond his silver. To understand him, you have to understand the trade that made him.

The First American Silversmiths

American silversmithing starts almost with the colonies themselves. The first known American-born silversmith was Jeremiah Dummer, born in Newbury, Massachusetts in 1645. Dummer apprenticed in London and returned to Boston in 1669, where he set up a shop and trained the next generation of American smiths—including John Coney, who would become one of Boston’s leading smiths in the early 1700s. Dummer died in 1718, having trained more than a dozen apprentices who themselves trained dozens more.

The craft spread geographically along the coast. By 1700, Boston was the leading silver center, followed by New York, Philadelphia, Newport, and Charleston. Each city developed its own flavor. Boston silver was the most restrained—Puritan influence kept ornament to a minimum. New York silver, influenced by the Dutch and later by Huguenot refugees, was more elaborate. Philadelphia silver (think Joseph Richardson and his sons) was the most technically refined. Charleston silver, made for a wealthy planter class, was the most opulent.

The early American smiths worked in a system that was consciously imitative of the English guild structure, but with one big difference: there were no assay offices. In England, an independent authority tested your silver and stamped it. In America, you stamped your own work and the buyer trusted you. That lack of oversight produced variation—American silver from this period ranges from genuinely sterling (92.5%) to coin silver (around 90%) to whatever a particular smith’s source happened to be. The “coin silver” tradition, where smiths melted down Spanish dollars or Mexican silver coins, was specifically American. It’s why American antique silver is stamped “coin” or “dollar” more often than “sterling.”

The Huguenot Influence

A major turning point in American silver was the arrival of the Huguenots. The Edict of Nantes, which had protected French Protestants since 1598, was revoked by Louis XIV in 1685. The result was a wave of skilled French Protestant refugees fleeing to Protestant countries—England, the Netherlands, the German states, and the American colonies. Among them were some of France’s best silversmiths.

In New York, the Huguenot influence was particularly strong. Charles Le Roux arrived in New York in the 1690s, having trained in La Rochelle. He became one of the colony’s most respected smiths and trained apprentices who carried the French style into the next generation. Bartholomew Le Roux (probably his son or nephew) continued the workshop. In Boston, Apollos Rivoire—a young Huguenot from Saintonge, on the French Atlantic coast—arrived in 1715 at the age of 13, apprenticed to John Coney, and Anglicized his name to Paul Revere. He was the father of the more famous Paul Revere.

That last fact is worth pausing on. The most American of all American silversmiths, the man who rode through the Massachusetts countryside warning that the British were coming, was the son of a French Huguenot immigrant. The American silver tradition is, from the beginning, an immigrant tradition.

How the Trade Worked

The colonial silversmith’s shop was a small industrial operation. A successful shop in Boston might have the master smith, two or three journeymen, and a couple of apprentices, all working in a single room with a forge, a bench, and a set of hammers and stakes. The shop produced to order—customers brought in silver coins or broken silver goods, and the smith converted them into the piece the customer wanted. The customer paid for the labor and kept the metal.

This system had a strange consequence: the customer owned the silver before the piece was made. The smith was working as a contractor, not as a manufacturer. That’s why colonial silver is often engraved with the owner’s crest or initials—the piece was made specifically for them, and the metal had been theirs from the start.

The apprenticeship system was formal. A boy (and it was almost always a boy) was apprenticed at around 14, served for seven years, and became a journeyman at 21. If he had capital, he could set up his own shop. If he didn’t, he worked for another smith until he could. The apprenticeship was a contract—the boy’s family paid the master a fee, and the master provided room, board, and training. The contracts survive for many of the major smiths, and they’re revealing. Paul Revere’s apprenticeship to his father isn’t documented in the usual way, because he was learning the family trade, but his later apprentices—he had at least 12—are recorded in his surviving account books.

What Colonial Silversmiths Made

The colonial silversmith’s output was overwhelmingly functional. Jewelry was a small part of the trade—the bulk of the work was tableware and household objects. Here’s what you’d find in a typical 1760s shop’s ledger:

• Tankards and cans (mugs): The most common output. Every household that could afford silver had a tankard or two. A can was a smaller mug, usually handled.
• Teapots: After tea became affordable in the early 1700s (the British East India Company’s imports grew dramatically), silver teapots became status objects. They’re also the pieces where smiths showed off—the spout, the handle, the finial, the engraved body all gave room for design.
• Creamers and sugar bowls: Paired with teapots, often as a set.
• Punch bowls: For serving punch, a popular colonial drink. The Sons of Liberty Bowl is a punch bowl.
• Salts and pepper boxes: Small containers for salt and pepper. Often ornate.
• Porringers: Small bowls with a handle, used for porridge or stew. Very common in colonial silver.
• Tablespoons and teaspoons: The workhorse output. A family might commission a set of 12 teaspoons as a wedding gift.
• Snuffboxes and patch boxes: Small ornamental boxes for personal items.

Jewelry was a smaller part of the trade—rings, buttons, buckles, shoe buckles, sword hilts. The American silversmith wasn’t a jeweler in the modern sense. He was a maker of small, valuable, functional objects. The fact that some of them were wearable (buckles, buttons, rings) doesn’t change that the trade was mostly about tableware.

The Revere Family

Apollos Rivoire, the father, arrived in Boston in 1715 as a 13-year-old refugee. He was apprenticed to John Coney, one of Boston’s leading smiths, and after his apprenticeship he set up his own shop. He anglicized his name to Paul Revere somewhere along the way—probably because the English-speaking colonists couldn’t reliably pronounce “Apollos Rivoire.” He married Deborah Hitchbourn in 1729, and they had 12 children. The second son, born in 1734, was named Paul after his father’s new name.

The younger Paul Revere grew up in the silver trade. He learned the craft from his father, took over the shop when Apollos died in 1754 (Paul was 19), and ran it for the next 60 years. In 1756, at 21, he enlisted briefly in the British colonial militia during the French and Indian War—the British and colonists were fighting the French for control of North America—and was commissioned a second lieutenant. He was stationed at Fort Edward in upstate New York. He didn’t see combat. He came home and went back to the shop.

The Revere shop, through the 1750s and 1760s, was a successful middling business. Revere was not the richest silversmith in Boston—that distinction belonged to Edward Winslow or Benjamin Burt—but he was well-established, with a steady clientele of merchants, sea captains, and the professional class. He made the standard range of silver: tankards, teapots, spoons, bowls. He also did engraving, which set him apart. Most smiths bought engraved pieces from specialists; Revere did his own engraving, which gave him control of the whole process and made him useful to the political class for printing broadsides and political cartoons.

Revere the Engraver and the Politics of Silver

The engraving skill is what took Revere out of the silver trade and into history. In the 1760s, as the conflict between the colonies and the British government escalated over taxation, Revere began producing political engravings—prints that circulated in Boston and beyond. His 1768 engraving of British troops landing in Boston Harbor was one of the first widely circulated pieces of American political propaganda. His 1770 engraving of the Boston Massacre, made three weeks after the event, became one of the most famous images of the American Revolution. It was technically inaccurate—Revere exaggerated the British soldiers’ aggression and the colonists’ passivity—but it was enormously effective as propaganda.

The Sons of Liberty Bowl, made the same year, is the silver object that connects these two worlds. Revere made it for a group of 15 Sons of Liberty, who commissioned it to commemorate their resistance to the Townshend Acts. The bowl is engraved with their names and with the date of their meetings. It’s a piece of tableware that’s also a political manifesto. The choice of silver—the most prestigious material available—was the point. These men were making a statement about their standing as much as their politics.

That’s the thing about Revere’s silver that gets lost in the folklore: it was always political, even when it wasn’t propaganda. A silver teapot made for a Boston merchant in 1765 was a statement about that merchant’s wealth and taste. When the merchant was a Patriot rather than a Loyalist, the silver was part of the same network of patronage and affiliation that the political engravings served. Revere’s account books, which survive at the Massachusetts Historical Society, show that his clients were disproportionately Patriot—the merchants, lawyers, and printers who would become the leadership of the American Revolution. The silver trade and the political network were the same network.

The Midnight Ride (and What It Was Actually For)

The Midnight Ride happened on the night of April 18–19, 1775. Revere wasn’t alone—William Dawes rode by a different route, and Samuel Prescott joined them partway. The riders were carrying word from Boston to Lexington and Concord that British troops were marching out to seize colonial munitions stored at Concord.

Revere was rowed across the Charles River to Charlestown—past the British warship HMS Somerset—around 10 p.m. He borrowed a horse in Charlestown and rode west through what’s now Somerville, Medford, and Arlington, warning houses along the route. He reached Lexington around midnight, where he warned John Hancock and Samuel Adams that the British were coming and that they should leave. Dawes arrived shortly after. The two then set out for Concord, joined by Prescott. They were intercepted by a British patrol around 1 a.m. Dawes escaped (he was thrown from his horse and walked back to Lexington). Prescott escaped and made it to Concord. Revere was held, questioned, and released without his horse. He walked back to Lexington in time to hear the first shots of the Battle of Lexington on the morning of April 19.

What gets lost in the Longfellow poem (written in 1860, 85 years after the fact) is that Revere didn’t actually make it to Concord. Dawes didn’t either. Prescott did. The poem makes Revere the sole hero because Longfellow needed a single protagonist, and Revere had the most famous name. The historical reality is that the warning got through because of three riders and a network of additional couriers they triggered along the way.

The reason I bring this up in a piece about silver: Revere wasn’t a soldier. He was a 40-year-old silversmith who happened to be trusted as a courier because he was a known Patriot and because his trade took him around Boston regularly. The Midnight Ride is the silver trade showing up in military history. The fact that we remember Revere and not the other couriers has everything to do with Longfellow and almost nothing to do with the relative importance of the ride itself.

The War Years

The War of Independence disrupted the silver trade badly. Boston was under British occupation from 1768 to 1776 (the evacuation happened March 17, 1776—still celebrated as Evacuation Day in Suffolk County, Massachusetts). Revere’s business collapsed. He tried several things to keep income coming in. He served briefly as a major in the Massachusetts militia, was promoted to lieutenant colonel, and was put in command of Castle Island in Boston Harbor. He was court-martialed in 1782 over his conduct during the failed Penobscot Expedition of 1779 (a disastrous American attempt to retake a British fort in Maine)—he was acquitted, but the experience was bitter.

The war years were lean for most American silversmiths. Many Loyalist smiths left—Charleston’s silver trade was gutted when Loyalists fled to England and the Caribbean at the end of the war. The Patriots who stayed struggled with disrupted supplies of silver (Spanish silver coins, the usual raw material, became scarce) and inflation. The Continental currency was worthless by 1781. Smiths who had been comfortable in 1770 were scrambling in 1780.

After the War: The Bell Foundry and the Copper Mill

The postwar years are where Revere’s career gets interesting again, and it’s where the American silver story turns into the American industrial story. Revere, now in his 50s, realized that the silver trade alone wasn’t going to support him. He diversified.

In 1792, he opened a foundry to cast bells. Bell-casting is a bronze-and-tin trade, not a silver trade, but it uses the same metalworking skills. Revere cast his first bell in 1792, and over the next 30 years his foundry produced nearly 400 bells for churches across New England. Some of them still ring. (A Revere bell at King’s Chapel in Boston, cast in 1798, is still in use.)

In 1801, Revere took on an even bigger project: a copper rolling mill. The United States, lacking domestic copper production, was dependent on imported copper sheet for sheathing ship hulls (to prevent barnacles and worm damage). Revere, working with his son Joseph Warren Revere and a financial backer named James Winthrop, established the Revere Copper Company in Canton, Massachusetts, in 1801. The mill was the first in North America to successfully roll copper into sheet. The Continental Navy and (after independence) the U.S. Navy became major customers—Revere copper sheathed American warships in the War of 1812.

The Revere Copper Company still exists. It’s now called Revere Copper Products, headquartered in Rome, New York, and it’s one of the oldest continuously operating manufacturing companies in the United States. The Revere Ware line of copper-bottomed cookware, which you’ve probably seen in a kitchen, was produced by the company from 1930 until the brand was sold to Corning in the 1980s. The line of descent from a Boston silversmith in 1768 to a kitchen pot in 2024 is direct.

Revere didn’t just make silver. He built the American metals industry. The copper rolling mill was the more important achievement, historically, than anything he made in silver. But the silver is what people remember, because silver is what you can hold in your hand.

Other Colonial Smiths Worth Knowing

Revere gets the press, but the colonial American silver story is bigger than him. Here are the other names I’d learn if I were starting a serious study.

Myer Myers (1723–1795, New York)

Myers was the most important Jewish silversmith in colonial America and one of the best silversmiths of any background. He worked in New York and made pieces for the city’s elite—governors, merchants, and the leaders of Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish congregation. His work is technically excellent and shows Dutch influence (New York was originally New Amsterdam). The Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles has a major collection of Myers silver. A Myers tankard can sell for $50,000–$200,000 today.

Jeremiah Dummer (1645–1718, Boston)

The first American-born silversmith, trained in London. His work is rare—fewer than 30 documented pieces survive—but it’s the foundation of the Boston silver tradition. His apprentice John Coney trained Apollos Rivoire (Paul Revere’s father). So every piece of Revere silver is, indirectly, a descendant of Dummer’s training.

The Richardsons (Philadelphia)

Joseph Richardson Sr. (1711–1784) and Joseph Richardson Jr. (1752–1831) were the leading Philadelphia smiths. The Richardsons were Quakers, and their work reflects the Quaker aesthetic—clean, restrained, well-proportioned. Richardson Jr. was a friend of Benjamin Franklin and made pieces for Franklin’s circle. Richardson silver is among the most refined of the colonial period.

Samuel Vernon (1707–1792, Newport)

Vernon was the leading smith in Newport, Rhode Island, and his work is associated with the wealthy Newport merchant class. He also happened to be a slave trader—the Vernon family’s wealth came in part from the Atlantic slave trade, which is a piece of context that complicates the romance of colonial silver. A lot of colonial silver wealth came from sources we’d now find uncomfortable.

Alexander Petrie (Charleston)

Petrie was the leading Charleston silversmith in the mid-1700s, and his work represents the most opulent of the colonial traditions. Charleston silver, made for the rice and indigo planters of South Carolina, was heavier and more ornate than Boston or Philadelphia silver. The Charleston tradition was largely destroyed by the Revolution—many Charleston smiths were Loyalists and fled—but surviving Petrie pieces are museum-grade.

The Honest Complications

I want to be honest about the things that don’t fit the patriotic story. The colonial American silver trade was built on wealth that came from sources we’d now consider morally compromised. The merchants and planters who commissioned the silver were often involved in the slave trade (directly or indirectly), in the China opium trade, in the expropriation of Native American land. The silver was made from coins that circulated through systems of exploitation. A silver teapot from 1765 Charleston is a beautiful object that was paid for, in part, by enslaved labor on rice plantations. That doesn’t make the silver less beautiful, but it’s part of the story.

Revere himself was complicated. He was a Patriot, but he was also a struggling businessman who used the war years to dodge creditors and who was (briefly) court-martialed. The Longfellow poem turned him into a clean-cut hero, but the historical Revere was sharper-edged—a craftsman, a propagandist, a businessman, and a man who was very good at making himself useful to whoever was in power. He was loyal to the Patriot cause, but he was also loyal to his own interests, and those two loyalties sometimes overlapped and sometimes didn’t.

What Revere Silver Looks Like

If you ever get to handle a real piece of Revere silver, here’s what to look for. The work is technically excellent but not flashy. Revere was a working smith, not a court goldsmith, and his pieces are made to be used. The surfaces are clean. The engraving is precise. The construction is solid—Revere’s soldering and seaming are consistent. The marks are his: “PAUL REVERE” in a rectangle, sometimes with a small eagle or bust added later in his career.

The most characteristic Revere pieces are the teapots. He made dozens, mostly in the 1770s and 1780s, and they show a clear design evolution. The earliest are curved Rococo forms with scroll handles. The later ones—especially after the war—are cleaner, more Federal in style, with straighter lines and neoclassical engraving. You can see the design vocabulary of the new republic forming in his teapots. That’s the connection between the silver and the politics.

How to Read Colonial American Silver Marks

American colonial silver is harder to authenticate than English because there was no assay system. Each smith stamped his own mark, and that was it. Here’s what to look for:

• The maker’s mark: Usually the smith’s initials or full name in a rectangle or cartouche. Revere used “PAUL REVERE.” Myers used “MM” in a heart. Richardson used “I·R” (the I is a J, since the alphabet hadn’t fully separated I and J yet).
• “Coin” or “Dollar”: Indicates the silver was made from melted coin. Common on 18th-century American pieces. The purity is around 90%.
• “Sterling”: Less common on early American pieces; more common after 1850.
• The original owner’s initials: Often engraved on the front of the piece. This is a strong sign of authenticity—colonial silver was made to order, and the initials match the original owner.
• Provenance documentation: For high-value American silver, the provenance (the documented chain of ownership) is often more important than the mark. A Revere piece with documented ownership history is worth multiples of an unattributed piece.

Counterfeits are a real problem. The big names—Revere, Myers, Richardson—have been faked for over a century. The best protection is to buy from a reputable dealer or auction house and to insist on documentation.

What Colonial American Silver Costs

This is not a budget category. American colonial silver has been collected seriously since the 19th century, and prices reflect that. A few reference points:

• Unsigned colonial-era silver spoon: $200–$800
• Signed piece by a known smith, in good condition (e.g., a tankard): $5,000–$25,000
• Revere piece (small, e.g., a spoon or small cann): $10,000–$50,000
• Revere teapot: $50,000–$250,000+
• Revere major piece (e.g., the Sons of Liberty Bowl): Museum-grade, not on the market
• Myer Myers piece: $30,000–$200,000
• Dummer piece (very rare): $50,000–$500,000

For most people, owning a real piece of colonial American silver isn’t realistic. The good news is that you don’t have to own one to appreciate the tradition. The major museum collections—the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Winterthur Museum—are accessible and well-curated. Go look at the pieces. Hold them in your eye before you ever try to hold one in your hand.

The Legacy: Why This Still Matters

Here’s the thing about colonial American silversmithing that I keep coming back to. It’s the moment when a distinctively American craft tradition starts. Before the colonial period, the metalwork in North America was either imported (English silver) or made by Native traditions (Navajo silver comes later, in the 1850s). The colonial smiths were the first people making silver objects in America—using American-sourced metal (mostly Spanish coins), trained by apprenticeships that happened on American soil, for American customers.

That tradition, scrappy and imitative as it was in the 1600s, became the American metals industry. Revere’s copper mill was the direct ancestor of the American copper industry. The apprenticeship system trained the smiths who, in the 19th century, would produce the silver flatware and hollowware of Gorham, Tiffany, and Reed & Barton. The tradition of “coin silver”—melting coins to make objects—persisted into the 1850s, when American silver finally standardized at 925 with the 1906 Stamping Act.

Revere died in 1818 at the age of 83, in his house in Boston’s North End (the house is now a museum, the Paul Revere House, and it’s worth a visit). By the time he died, the silver trade he’d grown up in was already transforming into something more industrial. The artisanal shop where one man raised a teapot from sheet was giving way to factories with power presses and division of labor. Revere’s own career traced the transition—from hand-raised silver to cast bells to rolled copper sheet. He lived through the change from craft to industry, and he participated in building the industrial America that came after.

What to Take Away

If you take one thing from this history, take this: American silver didn’t start with Tiffany. It started with a French Huguenot teenager who arrived in Boston in 1715, apprenticed to a Boston smith, Anglicized his name, and trained a son who would ride a horse through Massachusetts in 1775 warning that the British were coming. The whole tradition is a story about immigrants, apprenticeships, functional objects, and the slow building of an industry from almost nothing.

The silver itself is the evidence. When you see a colonial American tankard in a museum case, you’re looking at an object that was made by a specific person, in a specific shop, from metal that probably started as a Spanish coin. The maker’s mark on the bottom tells you who. The initials on the front tell you who it was for. The form tells you what they drank out of it. That’s a lot of information in a small object, and that’s what makes colonial American silver, even at museum prices, one of the most legible craft traditions in American history.

Revere’s silver is in museums because it’s historically important. It’s historically important because it’s where American metalworking starts. The fact that the man who made it also rode a horse one night in 1775 is the most famous coincidence in American craft history. The silver would matter even without the ride. The ride made sure we’d remember the silver.