History

Today Today Josh Freeman makes and sells paintings, photographs, and canvas prints on joshfreeman.org, and jewelry as Wampum World — all under Joshua L Freeman, the Massachusetts sole proprietorship he started as a young maker.

Late Oct 2026 In the last week of October 2026, right before Halloween, the gallery went live on joshfreeman.org — paintings and prints for sale online. Grok Bot from SpaceXAI helped put it together: what Donald Trump calls SI, Super Intelligence.

2010 joshfreeman.org itself was registered in 2010 as Josh’s personal website. For years it was just that — his own corner of the web — not a public gallery.

2002 Eight years earlier, in 2002, wampumworld.com had gone up to carry the jewelry.

~2000 Around 2000, the jewelry line took the name Wampum World — a new trade name on the same business.

1997–2000 In the few years just before that, from 1997 to 2000, Josh went by wampumjosh.

1996–2000 Over roughly the same stretch, from 1996 to 2000, he sold jewelry, scrimshaw, and baskets under The Barn Company and JFE Enterprises names.

1987–1991 Earlier still, from 1987 to 1991, Josh traded as Josh’s Suncatchers — his very first DBA.

1987 And it all goes back to 1987, when Josh registered Joshua L Freeman with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The names out front have changed; the company hasn’t. It has run continuously ever since.

~1993–today Before any of that, Josh grew up inside a jewelry family, and that family is still at work. His father, Richard A. Freeman, runs The Barn Company, a wholesaler and manufacturer. We make jewelry inside the United States and around the planet as well, and the company’s sterling silver is stamped RF for Richard Freeman. Josh’s mom, Louise A. Freeman, helps make the jewelry and run the company today — just as, decades earlier, she was secretary of Richard’s first corporation.

2004–2012 For a stretch, The Barn Company wore a corporate name: The Jewelry Barn, Ltd., organized in Raynham on Dec 28, 2004, with Richard as president. That corporation was dissolved June 18, 2012, and the business simply carried on as The Barn Company.

Mid-1980s–early 1990s Richard opened The Barn around 1993, after Tower Jewelry closed its factory and stores. From the mid-1980s into the early 1990s, Tower was a retail jewelry business, selling jewelry mostly purchased through factories in Providence and around the world, while still selling some of the jewelry made at the Fall River factory before that.

Early 1980s Before Tower came Providence Jewelers, about fifteen stores Richard built with partners in the early 1980s.

1974–1990 Running beneath all that retail was the shell work. In Fall River on Feb 8, 1974, Richard and Louise organized American Products Corp to make jewelry carved mostly from seashells — Richard as president and treasurer, Louise as secretary. It lasted until Dec 31, 1990.

1960s And the carving started earlier still, in the 1960s, when Richard began with scrimshaw. That hand skill led to the shells, and the shells to everything after.

Grandparents One generation further back, the family’s hands were already in silver. Josh’s grandfather Matthew Bury was Senior Vice President and Director of National and International Sales at Reed & Barton.

Grandparents And the craft ran through machines and cloth, too: Josh’s other grandfather, Edward Freeman, worked as a sewing machine mechanic in Fall River, and family memory places him earlier with the Louis Hand Company in Philadelphia.

1944–2008 In Fall River, Louis Hand, Inc. bought the old Pilgrim Mills on Pleasant Street in 1944 and made curtains and draperies there from 1945 — at its height the nation’s largest curtain and drapery maker — until the work ended in 2008.

Great-grandparents Before Matthew Bury, Josh’s great-grandfather Joseph Lamoureux was foreman of the repair department at the same silver company, Reed & Barton.

1824–today · ~202 years Reed & Barton reaches deepest into the family craft line of all. In 2026 the firm is about 202 years old, counting from its 1824 start in Taunton. It filed for Chapter 11 in 2015, and Lenox owns the brand today. Before that, it grew into one of America’s leading silversmiths in silverplate and sterling, supplying the U.S. Navy and the White House and making the medals for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. It took the name Reed & Barton in 1840 under former apprentices Henry G. Reed and Charles E. Barton. The same shop line began in 1824 as Babbitt & Crossman, making Britannia ware — the hard, bright tin alloy English makers in Sheffield had popularized in the late 1700s and shipped to America as a cheaper stand-in for silver. That British fashion is what two young Taunton jewelers set out to match on American soil. There was no older separate company underneath Reed & Barton — only this continuous Taunton partnership chain, changing hands and names while the same workshops, tools, and apprentices carried the work forward. Taunton mattered for that: mill power on the Mill River, an iron-working Leonard family already deep in local metal trades, and a jewelry culture that could learn Britannia metal and grow it into a factory. The people and intervening firm names of that chain are the next stretch of the story.

1824–1840 Isaac Babbitt (1799–1862) and William Ware Crossman (born 1794; accounts of his later life vary, one giving his death as 1882) were Taunton jewelers and goldsmiths. Babbitt had apprenticed under Charles Babbitt and, in his shop, worked out how to make Britannia metal in the United States — tin-based ware that polished more like silver than ordinary pewter, until then mostly an English import. In 1824 he partnered with Crossman as Babbitt & Crossman (also advertised as Babbitt, Crossman & Co.). They began in rented space in Roswell Ballard’s cloth mill on Spring Street, powered by the Mill River, and by about 1827 were making teaware in a factory on Lafayette Street. Merchant William Allen West joined as financial agent around 1827. The first partnership did not pay enough; by early 1829 Babbitt left, and when Zephaniah Leonard bought his share the firm became Crossman, West & Leonard — the Leonards being the family behind Taunton’s iron industry. Around 1830–32 it took the name Taunton Britannia Manufacturing Company (sources differ by a year or two). When that concern faltered in the mid-1830s, in the hard years around the Panic of 1837, apprentices Henry Gooding Reed (a metal spinner from 1828) and Charles Edward Barton (from Warren, Rhode Island, Crossman’s brother-in-law) stepped in with rented buildings, tools, and a small crew — Leonard, Reed & Barton about 1837, then Reed & Barton alone from 1840 when Gustavus Leonard sold his share. Babbitt later went to Boston’s South Boston Iron Works, cast early brass cannon there, and in 1839 invented Babbitt metal, the tin-based bearing alloy still used in engines; Congress awarded him $20,000 for it. He died in Somerville in 1862. Crossman stayed with the business through its next names.

The Britannia name · deeper still The English fashion those Taunton jewelers matched had a name with a long shadow. What follows is the story of Britannia ware in England, then of the name Britannia itself — Roman province, Britons, empire-era branding — then medieval legend (clearly marked), then the deep prehistory of the land that became Britain. Legend, history, and prehistory are kept separate on purpose.

c. 1769–1820s · History Britannia ware in England. The metal Babbitt & Crossman set out to match was born in Sheffield. Around 1769–70 the pewterer James Vickers began working a hard, bright tin alloy — roughly 90%+ tin hardened with antimony and a little copper, with no lead. It could be rolled thin, stamped and spun, and polished to a silvery shine, so teapots, coffee pots, candlesticks and spoons that looked like silver cost a fraction of silver or Sheffield plate. By the 1790s it was sold as “Britannia metal,” and English middle-class tables filled with it. That shining, affordable English fashion is what crossed the Atlantic to Taunton.

1600s–1800s · History Why “Britannia” sold. Britannia — a seated woman with shield and spear — was revived on English copper coins in 1672, and the song “Rule, Britannia!” (1740) made her a household emblem. To an 18th-century Sheffield maker, naming a metal “Britannia” said British-made, modern, respectable. That pride grew alongside Britain’s expanding trade and empire — an era with real costs to many peoples — but for the tableware trade the name was simply the strongest brand a homegrown metal could carry.

AD 410 – 1100s · History After Rome. In AD 410 the permanent Roman presence on the island ended — the same year imperial authority withdrew after Claudius’s conquest in AD 43 had first planted it. Over the next centuries Angles, Saxons and other settlers from across the North Sea shaped England, while British-speaking peoples held on in Wales, Cornwall, Cumbria and Brittany. The Latin name survived in writing, and the old Britons’ descendants kept the memory of being the island’s first people.

55 BC – AD 410 · History The Roman province of Britannia. Julius Caesar went to Britain in 55 and 54 BC, trading with the indigenous Britons — those visits were not a lasting conquest. Permanent Roman presence on the island began with Emperor Claudius’s invasion in AD 43, when southern Britain became the province of Britannia. Hadrian’s Wall (from AD 122) marked its northern edge, and Roman coins first pictured Britannia as a woman — the ancestor of the figure later stamped on English pennies. That Roman presence remained until AD 410, when imperial authority withdrew and Britain was left to govern itself. The name itself is older: Greek travelers around 325 BC (Pytheas of Massalia) recorded the islands as the Prettanic isles, likely from what the inhabitants called themselves.

c. 800 BC – AD 43 · History & archaeology The Britons before Rome. Iron Age Britain was a patchwork of tribes — Iceni, Catuvellauni, Brigantes and many more — speaking Brittonic Celtic languages, ancestors of Welsh, Cornish and Breton. They built hillforts and roundhouses, worked iron, bronze and gold, and traded with Gaul. DNA studies show Britain’s people descend largely from Neolithic farmers who arrived from the continent around 4000 BC and from Bronze Age newcomers after about 2450 BC, layered over earlier hunter-gatherers — no single migration, but a long mixing.

c. 830 & c. 1136 · Legend Brutus of Troy — a legend, not history. Medieval writers gave the Britons a grander origin. The 9th-century Historia Brittonum and then Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1136) told how Brutus, a great-grandson of the Trojan hero Aeneas, sailed with exiled Trojans to the island of Albion, defeated its giants, named the land Britain after himself, and founded “New Troy” on the Thames — London. The story was believed for centuries and flattered kings, but historians and archaeologists find no basis for it; it is a foundation myth, like Rome’s own Trojan legend.

c. 10,000 – 6,000 BC · Prehistory Doggerland and the making of an island. After the last Ice Age, Britain was not an island. A broad lowland of rivers, marshes and hills — Doggerland — joined it to the continent where the North Sea now lies, and hunter-gatherers like Cheddar Man (about 10,000 years ago) lived across it. Rising seas, and possibly a tsunami from the Storegga submarine slide off Norway around 6200 BC, drowned it; by roughly 6000 BC Britain had become an island. Fishermen still trawl up bones and stone tools from the North Sea floor.

c. 2.5 million – 12,000 years ago · Prehistory Ice, mammoths and sabre-tooths. During the Ice Age, glaciers advanced and retreated many times. About 450,000 years ago the Anglian ice sheet reached the edge of today’s London and pushed the Thames into its present course; at the last peak, some 27,000–20,000 years ago, ice covered most of Scotland, Wales and northern England. Woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, cave lions, hyenas and giant deer roamed the cold steppe. Britain had no true American-style mastodons, though much older mastodon-like elephants (Anancus) appear in East Anglian deposits over 2 million years old. The sabre-toothed cat Homotherium did live here — its teeth were found in Kents Cavern, Devon, and a jaw was dredged from the North Sea bed.

c. 900,000 – 40,000 years ago · Prehistory The first people — and Neanderthals. Footprints at Happisburgh, Norfolk, left more than 800,000 years ago, are the oldest human traces in northern Europe. About 500,000 years ago early humans (Homo heidelbergensis) butchered horses at Boxgrove, Sussex. Neanderthals followed — at Pontnewydd Cave in Wales around 230,000 years ago, and later at Lynford, Norfolk, alongside mammoths some 60,000 years ago. People came and went as the ice allowed. Our own species reached Britain by about 40,000 years ago; a jaw from Kents Cavern is among the earliest modern-human remains in northwestern Europe. The Neanderthals then disappear from the record.

1637–1639 The silver city itself is far older than the silversmiths. English settlers from the Plymouth Colony founded Taunton in 1637 (Tetiquet / Cohannet purchase), named for Taunton in Somerset, and the town was established by about 1639–1640. Elizabeth Pole and others from the West Country figure in the early purchase story; the place became Massachusetts’s “Silver City” only centuries later, when Reed & Barton and neighboring silver works flourished.

Before English settlement Before the English, this was Wampanoag country — Wôpanâak land of southeastern Massachusetts. The river and the place were known as Titicut / Tetiquet (“place of a great river”) and Cohannet. Related Wampanoag communities of the Taunton River watershed including Assawompsett–Nemasket and neighboring groups farmed, fished herring runs, and traveled the Massachusetts Bay Path and the river. Epidemics had already emptied many villages before Plymouth’s people walked inland; when Edward Winslow and Stephen Hopkins crossed the area in 1621 they found cleared riverside land and signs of the great plague. There was no lasting French, Spanish, Portuguese, or Viking town at Taunton. Vikings reached Vinland far to the north (Newfoundland). Portuguese and Basque fishers and French traders worked the wider Atlantic coasts; Verrazzano and other Europeans charted the shore in the 1500s — but inland Taunton stayed Indigenous until the English purchase. Later centuries brought Irish, English, Canadian, Portuguese, Italian, and Cape Verdean workers to Taunton’s mills; that is settlement after the English town, not before it.

Ice Age → First Peoples Deeper still: the Laurentide Ice Sheet covered southeastern Massachusetts at the Last Glacial Maximum, roughly 26,000–21,000 years ago. The ice began its major retreat after about 18,000 years ago; by roughly 15,000 years ago it had pulled well north of this coast. Under that ice there was no continuous human home. After the ice left, Paleoindian peoples entered the New England–Maritimes region — early sites in the broader Northeast date from about 13,000–12,200 years ago (calibrated), with later Paleoindian and Archaic occupations following. Archaic-period use of the Taunton area is documented from roughly 9000–1500 BCE. So the first people here arrived after the glaciers pulled back; the glaciers of the Wisconsinan ice age are what blanketed Taunton before that.