Bread trough

19th cent. bread trough: East Texas farm. Originally owned by a Choctaw Indian woman who married in 1853. She married into an extended family of Anglo settlers who'd come to Texas in a wagon train immediately following the Revolution of 1836. The Choctaw were peaceful agriculturalists on the Mississippi; it is not known how or where she met her husband.

The trough is extremely smooth. It has straight sides, inside and out, which is probably explains why they were called troughs rather than bowls. One could mix, knead, and rise dough in it without a table, an obvious advantage for a pioneering homesteader. The ends on the underside have shallow nicks that appear to be from a knife tip. I guess the bowl would have been turned over to cover rising dough on a counter and got the nicks that way.