Salt spoons appeared in England beginning in the seventeenth century and were made in some quantity during the eighteenth. In England, the first and preferred form for the bowl was the shovel shape, which was gilded for protection against the corrosive effects of salt.
Colonial American salt spoons, by contrast, appear infrequently with a shovel-shaped bowl. That is particularly true for those made in eighteenth-century New England; few examples can be identified, and the use of a spoon was more likely to be inferred by its scale rather than its specialized shape.
This pair constitutes the only known shovel-shaped salt spoons to have been made in Jacob Hurd’s shop. An unmarked pair made for Benjamin and Mary (Toppan) Pickman has been attributed to John Coburn by Kathryn C. Buhler. In 1796 Paul Revere made four “salt shovels” for Jonathan Hunnewell, a bricklayer and president of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics Association. As the number of silversmiths and the demand for silver grew in nineteenth-century America, the shovel-shaped bowl attained latter-day popularity.
According to family history, these spoons were traditionally associated with a pair of trencher salts made by John Coney between 1710 and 1720 (cat. no. 34).

This text has been adapted from "Silver of the Americas, 1600-2000," edited by Jeannine Falino and Gerald W.R. Ward, published in 2008 by the MFA. Complete references can be found in that publication.

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