These candy dish fragments were excavated at the Plaster House site in Gray County, possibly a late 19th- or early 20th-century dugout. The fragments were reconstructed in the archeology lab. The dish is decorated in etched floral and cut linear patterns. The occupants of the dugout were most likely the family of Oliver and Anna Mitchell; Oliver Mitchell was described in his obituary as a horse rancher. Settlement in this area of Kansas mostly post-dated the construction of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad in 1872 and experienced a boom during with the construction of the Soule Canal in the mid-1880s.
