Let’s begin with a few definitions, idiosyncratic though they may be.
Definitions:
Archaeology
Archaeology, at it’s most basic is simply digging interesting
things out of the ground. In some cases, when certain
constraints I mention later are in effect, it may be limited to
picking up interesting things from the ground, although we
were all taught as children never to do that. As an
autobiographical aside, it occurs to me that my interest in
archaeology is entirely a reaction to a childhood of being
told, “Don’t pick that up!”
Weller Dickensware II Vase
Zanesville, Ohio, ca. 1910
In any case, I stress the word “interesting.” To an
archaeologist for an item to be “interesting” it must have the
potential to provide information about the person or persons
who made it, used it, bought or sold it, broke, it and through
it away, as well as more abstract information about why
they did those things. Artifacts are nothing more nor less
than bits of data. Because of this, the reasons for the
archaeologist’s inherent interest in ceramics should be
obvious.
“AH broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!”-Edgar Allan Poe, "Lenore," The Raven and Other Poems, 1845
Arc-en-Ceil
Pottery,
Zanesville,
Ohio, ca. 1905
The brutal truth is that archaeologists usually prefer the broken bowl, not just so that they
have something to do gluing the sherds back together but because pottery, though fragile
when whole, paradoxically becomes almost indestructible once it is broken. It may be
broken in to smaller and smaller pieces, but these pieces tend to be very resistant and inert.
Also, since pottery is entirely artificial and is formed to the creator’s
whim, it tends to vary greatly, within certain utilitarian limits. Because
it usually presents a plain surface ideal for decoration , it is often further
modified by painting or other means of decoration. So, while essentially
utilitarian in nature, pottery practically begs to be turned into art, and
we see through the course of even its brief history in Ohio an increasing
tendency for the artistic impulse to overtake the utilitarian. When that
actually happens— and we can pinpoint it to about 1876—
art pottery is born.
It May be Pottery but is it Art?
A few examples of the variety of Ohio ceramics, roughly in the chronological order in
which the dominated the Ohio ceramic scene:
Utility Ware
T.J. Wheatley Faience Windowbox
Cincinnati 1880
Art Pottery
T. Reed Stoneware Jar
Tuscarawas Co. ca.1865
Art China
Novelty China Ware
Grindley Ware Elephant Bank
Sebring, Ohio, ca. 1945
Clarus Ware
Coshocton 1905
Why Ohio?
Ohio can be defined in many ways— politically, for example,
as “the home of the Taft family—but in terms of pottery, it is
definitely “The Pottery Center of the World,” although
Zanesville and East Liverpool may continue to argue about
which city is the pottery center of Ohio. Reasons for
this dominance in ceramics are geologic, geographic, and
economic: an abundance of high-quality clays in the bedrock
of southeastern Ohio, cheap fuel in the form of (initially)
timber and (later) coal, natural gas, and petroleum. The
decline of ceramics production in Ohio is also due to
economic factors—cheap foreign imports—dare we mention
Noritake?”—the introduction of plastics—a material not only
more plastic but cheaper than clay-- and changes in taste or popularity.
Ohio: Pottery Center of the
World
Clay, Fuel, Market, Transportation
High grade fire clay along I-70 West of Zanesville
Now, a quick run-through of the
major types of ceramics produced in
Ohio, leaving out some economically
important but esthetically marginal
commodities such as brick , sewer tile,
and bathroom fixtures, and filled with
gross generalizations and oversimplifications: redware, salt-glazed
stoneware, yellow ware and Rockingham.
Early Ohio Utility Ware
Redware--In the beginning, say 1780, a crude, low
fired pottery that burned to a red color and so
known as “redware” was the standard material for
utilitarian pottery, covered with a clear lead glaze
to make the pots and plates water-proof. Redware
is still made today, most obviously in the common
unglazed flower pot. Unfortunately for the
pioneers, the lead glaze proved to be poisonous,
but by the time that was discovered redware was
giving way, circa 1820, to a higher fired, sturdier
stoneware, glazed with common rock salt.
Ohio Redware
Redware Crock
H. T. Kellogg
New London, Ohio
ca. 1850
Ohio: Early Utility Ware
OHIO SALT-GLAZED STONEWARE
During pioneer days there was little impulse to
decorate or even to put the potter’s name on
redware. Stoneware more frequently bore the name
of the manufacturer, usually impressed, and it was
sometimes embellished with bright blue cobalt
designs,or more rarely with incised sgraffito
designs, primitive but decorative.
D. Fisk Jug, Akron ca. 1850
Around 1840, a refined earthenware that burned to a
yellow color and therefore was known as “yellow
ware” became quite popular, in large part because
unlike redware and stoneware it was not thrown” on
the potter’s wheel but could be molded into a much
greater variety of shapes. Yellow ware, often covered
with a clear brown “Rockingham” glaze was so cheap
Early Ohio Utility Ware
Yellow Ware
that manufacturers seldom bothered to mark with with their name, although much of
it was virtually indistinguishable. As a case in point, this yellow ware chamberpot –
about as utilitarian as one can get-- could have been made by any of several dozen
different potteries, but excavation at the Quaker Valley pottery in Rogers, Ohio (near
East Liverpool)recovered distinctive sherds that let us identify this particular example.
Decorated Yellow Ware
I digress a bit to show several rare examples of decorated
Ohio yellow ware and stoneware. The only known piece
of pottery from Salineville, Ohio’s Eureka Pottery, ca.
1877, in business for only a few years, possibly because
it could not possibly afford to hand-paint all of its ware
like this, probably because it could not compete with
larger yellow ware factories in nearby East Liverpool,
and also because yellow ware by this time was losing its
popularity in favor of white ware. Diligent research
in court house records and every other possible documentary source fails to determine where in Salineville this
pottery stood. The sole historic reference to it is a directory entry that simply places it somewhere on Main Street.
Eureka Pottery, Salineville
ca. 1877
Quaker Valley Rebecca at the Well
Rockingham Decorated Teapot
The Quaker Valley Rebecca at the Well
teapot is an fine example of Rockingham
yellow ware. The Rebecca motif was
very popular following the Civil War
because of the woman’s social/religious/
self-improvement society, the Daughters
of Rebecca. Over 45 variants of this
design are know, although only about ten
can be identified to manufacturer. Test
excavation at the Quaker Valley Pottery
had the serendipitous result of identifying
distinctive sherds of this particular teapot
style.
Quaker Valley Rebecca Teapot ca. 1885
Sgraffito Decorated Stoneware
Standard Pottery Co.
I mentioned incised sgraffito decoration rarely occurring on some
stoneware. Here is the only known example of stoneware pottery from
Salineville’s little Standard Pottery Co. and a fine example of
serendipity. Possibly the first piece of pottery made in the kiln, it has
been inscribed STANDARD POTTERY CO. and a picture of a round
beehive kiln and the tall chimney that carried the noxious fumes away.
We might wonder whether the Standard Pottery actually looked like
this—the site is now a car wash—but fortunately a contemporary
“birdseye view of Salineville” just barely managed to include the kiln
and chimney. And the layout corresponds well with existing Sanborn
fire insurance maps.
Sgraffito Decorated Stoneware
Standard Pottery Albany Slip Jug
Standard Pottery Salineville ca. 1900
Sgraffito Decorated Stoneware
Riley Bratton Pottery
One more example of sgraffito-decorated stoneware, from Riley
Bratton’s small pottery in western Muskingum County. Twenty years
ago this site was destroyed by amateur bottle collectors digging for
relatively complete crocks. The did not find any whole pots or jugs
but saved the decorated sherds on the theory that someday they might
run across a complete example that could be identified by virtue of the
decoration. The theory was a good one , but happily I was able to
photograph the sherds and use them to identify this crock, as well as
several others. In particular, the impressed numerical capacity marks
include fine cross-hatching that perfectly matches that on the jug. The
sad fact is that this is only one of several hundred similar stoneware
pottery sites that have been destroyed by indiscriminate digging.
Sgraffito Decorated Stoneware
Riley Bratton Jug ca. 1850
Sherds from Riley Bratton Pottery
Muskingum County, Ohio
Later Ohio Utility ware
Following the Civil War, yellow ware and Rockingham gave way to
more popular white ironstone and finer semi-vitreous china or semiporcelain—not quite translucent or hard enough to be called true
porcelain, but providing much more attractive table ware and toilet
ware (wash pitchers, etc.) than did yellow ware. Both the heavy duty
ironstone and lighter weight semi-porcelain provided excellent
surfaces for first transfer printing and later decal decoration of colored
designs—and this lead to the huge china dinnerware industry that
provided tableware for most of us in our youth and childhood. It also
lead to a large variety of advertising and commemorative china, as
well as novelty pottery and later, innumerable ash trays and salt and
pepper shakers.
Later Ohio Utility Ware
White Ironstone Vitreous Semi-Porcelain
Brockmann Pottery Cincinnati
Tea Leaf Ironstone ca. 1890
D. McNicol East Liverpool
Star Players Plate ca. 1915
Ohio Art Pottery
Finally we get to Art Pottery, almost entirely a child of the the
Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, when a French Limoges
technique of hand-painting glazed earthenware was introduced and
became extremely popular in the United States, particularly in
Cincinnati-- need I mention, the home of the Taft family? A wealthy
young woman named Maria Longworth Nichols Storer organized a
group of her friends into the Cincinnati Pottery Club, and this
eventually lead to the Rookwood Pottery, probably the best know art
pottery in the world. One of Mrs. Storer’s friends, Laura Fry,
developed the atomizer technique for applying decoration, left
Rookwood for a Steubenville pottery, and patented the process. At
what point any friendship with Mrs. Storer ended is not known, but it
had definitely chilled by the time Fry tried to enjoin the Rookwood
Pottery from using her decorating technique. At this point, Judge
William Howard Taft declared that Fry’s process was not a new one
and anyone could use it to decorate pottery. Andy everyone did.
Ohio Art Pottery
Weller Pottery, Zanesville ca.
1915
Zanesville Art Pottery
LaMoro Ware
Marco Pottery 1946
Zanesville, Ohio
Art China
The dinner ware manufacturers were quick to
sense a good thing and tried to compete by
developing their own lines of ‘art china”—often
just a designation for their fancier dinnerware. Art
china proved popular for a number of years
immediately before and after the turn of the last
century but was not sufficient to be anything more
than a sideline. It gradually devolved into the
production of souvenir and commemorative ware,
including give-aways and novelty items such as
calendar plates and advertising novelties.
Ohio Art China
Laughlin Art China ca. 1905
East Liverpool, Ohio
Harker Calendar Plate
East Liverpool, Ohio 1907
Novelty Ware
Chic and Grindley Pottery
Zanesville and Sebring 1945
Juanita Ware Dalton Ohio
ca. 1950 Cow Creamer
Cordelia China
Dalton Ohio 1948
Nicodemus Lion
Columbus 1950
Ford Ceramic Arts
ca. 1940 Columbus
Four Calla Lily Vase from
Four Different Ohio Potteries
Art Pottery Archaeology
So what does all this have to do with archaeology?
or vice-versa?
I will give one example of how our knowledge of
archaeology can contribute to the understanding of
an archaeological site, but frankly this does not
happen often, because archaeologists understandably are not particularly interested in such recent
sites. And art pottery, while it was not all
especially expensive when it was made, is not
often found even on 20th Century sites.
Art Pottery Archaeology:
Crabapple Creek Farmstead
Farmhouse Foundations
Pottery from Dump
Here are the stone foundations of a small farmhouse in eastern Ohio, near Flushing, Belmont
County, since strip mined away for coal. Before the coal company could begin mining, it had to
demonstrate that no structures or sites eligible to the National Register of Historic Places would
be impacted. One criterion used is whether the site is younger than 50 years (i.e., 1950), and this
can sometimes be determined by examining the refuse dump associated with such farmhouses
Crabapple Creek Farmstead
In this case, along with numerous broken and complete canning jars,
Clorox jars, milk bottles, etc., some fragments of pottery occurred,
including the tail end of a blue swan planter made by the American
Bisque pottery of Marietta, Ohio, ca. 1930-1980, a plain coffee cup
identifiable as having been made by the Scio Pottery (1934-1982),
only about 15 miles north of the farm site, and a broken art pottery
vase marked Hull, with embossed water lily.
Throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, major “industrial” art
potteries, including Roseville Pottery , of Zanesville, Ohio, and Hull
Pottery of Crooksville, Ohio, produced a new floral line every year or
so. In the case of Hull, which, incidentally, began as a manufacturer of
standard stoneware crocks and jugs, their Waterlily line was made for
only two years, 1948-1949, though its demise may have been due
partly to the total destruction of the Hull Pottery by flood and fire in
June, 1950. Archaeologically, the point is that, allowing a year or two
for this Hull Water Lily vase to be broken and discarded, the farm
dump clearly dates later than 1950.
Hull Art China
Hull Water Lily
ca. 1948
Hull Pottery, Crooksville, ca. 1915
Art Pottery Archaeology: Considerations
Of more interest to me is the ability to use archaeological concepts and
techniques to determine new information about art pottery. This
involves some obvious question such as:
Where to dig? As mentioned in the case of the Eureka yellow ware
pottery, some simply cannot be located precisely.
More importantly, there should be a specific reason and rationale for
excavation. Archaeologists don’t just dig randomly, they excavate in
order to test hypotheses and obtain new knowledge.
In some cases, Serendipity occurs and we find more than we are
looking for or something entirely different than what we were looking
for.
But in almost all cases there are a number of constraints.
and Constraints
Constraints:
• Permission of the land owner is essential.
• There may be nothing significant to excavate—there may be no ware
there. Perhaps the site has been completely removed or destroyed, by
subsequent industrial activity or , as in the case of Riley Bratton’s
stoneware pottery, by over-enthusiastic amateurs.
• Any archaeological activity involves time and labor, which is to say
money. There are few institutions sufficiently interested in the history
of art pottery as to sponsor expensive excavations.
• Art pottery archaeology can involve redundancy in two ways. Most
pottery sites yield an incredible amount of ceramic material that is
essentially the same. Thousands of sherds provide no additional data
but must be excavated and processed, if not curated.
Archaeological work on historic pottery sites may also be quickly made redundant or
passé with the discovery of a previously unknown company catalog. Here, librarianship
has proven useful, although newly discovered catalogs, regardless of condition, usually
command prices comparable to the pottery they describe and consequently don’t end up
in library collections . The few surviving trade catalogs are rapidly snapped up by art
pottery collectors when they occasionally come on the market.
J. B. Owens Catalog, Zanesville, Ohio. 1895
Archaeological Contributions
Finally, I would like to present some examples of how
archaeology can contribute to our knowledge of the history
of art pottery. In the mid 1990s, a group of high school
students from Rocky River, on Cleveland’s west side,
decided to excavate at the nearby site of the Cowan
Pottery, much of which is still standing. During the 1920s
and early ‘30s, before succumbing to the Great Depression,
Cowan was world famous for its art deco ceramics.
Cowan was even asked to head OSU’s new ceramics
department, but recommended Arthur E. Baggs instead.
And Cowan artist Paul Bogatay taught at OSU for many
years.
Example 1: Cowan Pottery
The Crew
The Site
While these students’ field technique was perhaps not the best, they did screen and they did find
sherds of Cowan art pottery.
Cowan Archaeology
Cowan Dig
Cowan Decanters
From
Bassett &
Naumann
1997
You will note the bright red fragment matches the top of the Cowan “King of Hearts” decanter.
And …
Cowan Pottery
there is a fragment of one of Cowan’s “Sunbonnet Girl” bookends. But as
interesting as this endeavor was as a high school project, it did not contribute or
discover any new knowledge about Cowan, for the simple reason that this pottery
has been so thoroughly studied that there is not much left to discover.
Example 2: Pope-Gosser Pottery
or, Why Bother?
Clarus Ware, Pope-Gosser Pottery, ca. 1905
Pope-Gosser Today
Pope-Gosser Plant
Pope-Gosser Waster Dump
Similarly, Clarus Ware is a very nice Edwardian art china produced by the Pope Gosser Pottery of
Coshocton, Ohio, for a few years around 1903. And one can got to Coshocton, where some of
the Pope-Gosser buildings still stand—it produced good quality dinnerware until 1958, though
not of the quality of their early Clarus Ware, which has been confused by experts with R.S.
Prussia china. If you cross the railroad tracks and slide down the creek bank, you will find PopeGosser’s waster pile, tons of discarded broken dinnerware, mostly unglazed. But there is no
reason to excavate here. Their Clarus Ware shapes as well as all of their dinner ware is not only
well documented but commonly available. Here is an excellent example of redundancy: what
could anyone possibly learn from all these sherds?
Example 3: Florentine Pottery
Ohio Centennial Vase and Look-alike
With our third example we will have better luck. The Florentine Pottery was found in
Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1900 by a wealthy furniture store owner who hired a potter away from the
Owens Pottery of Zanesville. Although it was claimed that George Bradshaw accidentally
discovered an unusual metallic glaze shortly before his death, it is so like Owen’s Feroza glaze
that he undoubtedly had simply taken the Owens formula along with him. In any case,
Florentine’s EFFECO glaze won a prize at the 1904 St. Louis World Fair. Florentine pottery was
seldom if ever marked. The one tripodal vessel was made to commemorate the Ohio centennial
in 1903 and is know to have been made by the company; the very similarly-shaped pot so closely
resembles it that it can be comfortably attributed to the pottery as well.
Florentine Pottery
Effeco or Efpeco?
Several years ago I found a matt green vase marked, unfortunately above the glaze, so that
anyone might have written it, Florentine Pottery EFPECO ware 1903. Whoever wrote it knew
what they were talking about, because a letter was eventually discovered in the Ohio Historical
Society’s collection, in which the company mentions their EFPCO ware. “Effeco” was simply
based upon a typographical error in the Brick and Clay Record, a weekly trade publication that
OSU Libraries happens to have it in its collections.
Florentine Pottery ca. 1905
Today
But wouldn’t it be nice to confirm this identification by being able to go to Chillicothe and find
some sherds of EFPECO ware? Here is a contemporary view of the Florentine Pottery and what
it looks like today. The additional buildings were added after the Florentine Pottery turned from
artware to sanitary ware in 1905. Fragments of bathroom sinks and toilet bowls are the most
common sherds found at the site today. But if you look to the upper end of the pottery buildings
in the postcard view, you will see mounds of white waster material along the railroad.
Florentine Pottery
• Sherds from site and matching jardiniere
If we go there today and excavate a bit, we find both glazed and unglazed sherds of Florentine
jardinières and pedestals and umbrella stand, the chief forms of artware that the pottery made
during its brief existence. Haunting antique shops and auctions has produced matching examples
of some of Florentine’s blended glaze ware, and before this research
Florentine Pottery
• Sherds and matching jardiniere & pedestal
Much of this ware—this green and gold glazed jard and
ped in particular—would have been ascribed to a
Zanesville art pottery. This undoubtedly was another
glaze formula that Bradshaw brought with him from
Zanesville.
From the Ceramic Sublime to the
Ceramic Ridiculous
We now move from the ceramic sublime to the ceramic ridiculuous—from art pottery to novelty
pottery. This is a Sanborn fire insurance map of the U.S. Novelty Pottery (a.k.a Chic Pottery)
along the west bank of the Muskingum River in South Zanesville, ca. 1950. This is one method
of determining precisely where to excavate.
Example 4: Chic Pottery, Zanesville
For years the site has been dug through by local citizens intent on finding
ceramic figurines and such that are relatively undamaged and can be sold in local
shops. That effort has been only moderately successful and any archaeological
integrity that this portion of the site may have had has been destroyed in the
process. The digging has, however allowed me to collect examples of virtually
every shape that the Chic Pottery produced, along with the actual plaster molds
in which the pottery was formed. Since Chic Pottery is often unmarked and
confused with the similar products of other local novelty potteries, this work is
of some value. I have even been able to locate the daughter of the Hugh Garee,
the artist who designed many of these molds.
Chic Pottery Hound Dog Figurines and Treed Opossum
Of more interest archaeologically is the fact that beneath the several feet of Chic pottery
debris, at least in the small area of hillside exposed by the outlet of Goose Creek, there
is a thin layer containing redware sherds undoubtedly produced by the Sam Weller
pottery, which used this site for storage during the 1870s. Here you may be able to see
a few redware sherds below about 4 feet of blast furnace slag used to stabilize the
railroad spur, above which are light-colored sherds of Chic pottery. In terms of
stratigraphy—the preservation of superimposed layers of different age—this is as good
as it gets in archaeological terms. The sign, put up only recently does not say “No
Trespassing,” it warns that during high water Goose Creek delivers raw sewage into the
Muskingum. It is not a pleasant place to work under the driest of conditions. But these
redware sherds can be used to identify Weller’s earliest pottery, which consisted mostly
of decorated flowerpots and cuspidors.
Chic Pottery, Zanesville
Mouth of Goose Creek
Chic Pottery
Novelties
A sample of Chic novelties speaks volumes and suggests why the pottery did
not survive beyond 1955. There simply was not enough demand for novelty
ashtrays, salt and pepper shakers and florists’ ware, despite fairly ingenious
marketing, such as …
Chic Pottery Novelties
Aladdin Camel and Original
Hugh Garee Model for it
this camel figurine, one of which you
can see on display in the Aladdin
Temple on Stelzer Road. Shown with
it is the original model, from which
designer Hugh Garee made the plaster
molds from which the ceramic
figurines were made. Also a “Father
Knickerbocker” shoe souvenir of the
1939 New York World’s Fair, though
made for many years after.
Father Knickerbocker Shoe 1939
Mold from Dump
Example 5: Peters and Reed Pottery
Standard Glaze Ware
From M. & S. Sanford 2000
Briefly, back to art pottery. Some experts attribute
this standard glaze ware with sprigged-on cameos,
much like Wedgwood in concept though entirely
different redware body, is attributed to the Peters
and Reed Pottery of South Zanesville. Others note
that identical shapes were used by the Samuel
Weller Pottery and think that the line was made by
Weller. No one has found any documentation,
despite the fact that catalogs and other printed
materials are available for both potteries.
Peters and Reed
Site Today
Ground Surface
At the Peters and Reed factory site, now a parking lot, the ground is littered with bits of redware
flower pot and art pottery, and about ten years ago the O.K. Concrete Co. excavated two huge
holes to dump their concrete mixer wastewater into. This uncovered mountains of Peters and
Reed sherds, 90% of which were plain flower pots. I avidly collected the fancier sherds—just
like the guys at the Riley Bratton pottery—and found most of the known Peters and Reed art
pottery lines represented, but none of this standard glaze sprigware. I am fairly well convinced
that it wasn’t made here.
Owens/Brush Pottery
Brush Pottery Building
Waster Material
Another art pottery historian believes that this ware was made by the J. B. Owens Pottery of
Zanesville prior to its destruction by fire in 1905. The Brush Pottery, which took over the Owens
site, burned in 1918, although the building is still used today by the Hartstone Pottery.
Considerable pottery debris litters the surroundings, and we are attempting to get permission to
test excavated for “Peters and Reed sherds.”
Example 6: Roycroft
Roycroft Bookstand
Copper Bud Vase
From
D. Rago 2002
A final example of the potential of an archaeological approach to art pottery involves the famous
Roycroft industry of East Aurora, New York, founded by Elbert Hubbard in 1895, best known for
its furniture and copper arts and crafts objects. The copper bud vase, incidentally was designed
by Dard Hunter, papermaker and artist from Chillicothe, Ohio
We now know of another Roycroft Ohio connection. Following the death of Elbert and
Mrs. Hubbard on the Lusitania in 1915, their son continued the Roycroft project but
with dwindling success. Some money was raised by selling small souvenir jugs of
honey—the honey bee, noted for its industry, was a sort of icon for the Roycrofters.
Many Roycroft collectors assume these little brown jugs were made at East Aurora by
the Roycrofters, but in fact they were bought wholesale from a previously unknown
pottery that simply used the Roycroft insignia.
Hold this thought while I shift to an unusual ceramic tradition common in the Southern
United States, that of the grotesque effigy jug., a tradition that may be traced back to
African slaves but in any case has seen an incredible renaissance during the last 15
years or so, to become a regular cottage industry in parts of South Carolina and
Georgia.
Example 6: Face Jugs
A Variety of Contemporary Southern Face Jugs
From Southern Folk Pottery Collectors Society 2001
Roycroft
John Dollings Face Jug
White Cottage ca. 1870
Ed Hicks Face Jug
Star Pottery 1930
Ohio, too, had a small effigy jug tradition centering around the town of White Cottage, southwest
of Zanesville. Here around 1870 John Dollings produced several effigy jugs These are very
collectible and now sell for in excess of $10,000 each. The tradition continued as late as 1930
when Ed Hicks, working at the Star Stoneware pottery in Crooksville, Ohio, south of Roseville,
made and signed and dated one distinctly like the earlier Dollings jugs.
Roycroft Honey Jugs
About 15 years ago, I saw but did not acquire a miniature effigy jug identical in style to Ed
Hicks’ but bearing the impressed Roycroft logo, convincing me that the Roycroft honey jugs
were made at the Star Pottery. Just two years ago I was able to acquire what I think is the same
miniature jug and discovered that it, too, is dated 1930.
Roycroft
Roycroft Miniature Face Jug and Base
So, I repeat myself, just as with Chillicothe’s Florentine Pottery, wouldn’t it be great to be able to
go to the site of the Star pottery and find some Roycroft-marked sherds?
Crooksville Star China
Star Stoneware Co.
Site Today
Here is what the pottery looked like when it was in operation and what the site looks like today.
Serendipitously, I visited the site while the footers for this new building were being excavated
and found lots of Star Stoneware sherds, but no little brown jug fragments.
Subsequently, however, a Crooksville pottery collector asked me about the Roycroft mark. He
was unfamiliar with it but reported that his father had found broken sherds with the mark along
the old Star Stoneware pottery railroad siding. Independent confirmation, I think, that Star
Stoneware employees were unwitting Roycrofters.
Find the Roycroft Jug in This Picture
Star Stoneware Railroad Siding Today
But… wouldn’t it be great to be able to go back to that railroad siding and find a
Roycroft jug? This is what it looks like today and back in that brush the ground is
littered with stoneware sherds waiting to be excavated.
The Unanswered Question
In conclusion, I hope I’ve demonstrated how useful
archaeology can be in learning more about the
history of Ohio art pottery. There is one question,
however that archaeology cannot answer, in fact
would not even consider appropriate. Only each of
you can answer it, and I will leave you with that
question:
Would I Want This Pottery on My
Mantle?
KT&K Lotus Ware
East Liverpool 1897
Meric Art Ware ca. 1930
Wellsville, Ohio
Alfred E. Neuman Bust
Nouvelle Pottery, Zanesville
ca. 1950
References and Further Reading
Bassett, Mark, and Victoria Naumann
Cowan Pottery and the Cowan School. Atglen, Pa: Schiffer,
1997
Evans, Paul
Art Pottery of the United States. New York: Feingold &
Lewis, 1987
Murphy, James L.
Quaker Valley Pottery’s Rebecca at the Well Teapot. Ohio
Historical Decorative Arts Association Newsletter. 5(1): 3,
1996
Murphy, James L.
Ford Ceramic Arts, Columbus, Ohio. Journal of the
American Art Pottery Association. 14(2): 12-14, 1997
Murphy, James L.
Art Pottery Archaeology: The Enduring Enigma of Peters
and Reed. Journal of the American Art Pottery Association.
16(6): 8-14, 1999
Rago, David
Craftsman Arts & Crafts Auction Weekend, September
21/22, 2002. Lambertville, NJ: Rago, 2002
Sanford, Martha and Steve
Sanfords Guide to Peters and Reed. Atglen, Pa.: Schiffer
2000
Southern Folk Pottery Collectors Society
Absentee Auction Sale Event 17. Bennett, NC: The Society, 2001