Ward-Graake Pottery:
A Brief History of the Manatee River Art Pottery
By Nick
Baden
Manatee County Historical Society
Luncheon Meeting at
“Renaissance on 9th” Street
Bradenton, Florida
February 16, 2011
NICK BADEN: Libby [Warner] was here in 1969 when Mrs. Dowd gave this same talk
on Ward Pottery. She actually typed up Mrs. Dowd’s speech and it’s in this book if any
of you are interested. [Book is ] I don’t know why I was so interested in pottery. I don’t
make pottery. But at an early age I was aware that on this certain corner on Manatee
Avenue, Mrs. Ward made pottery there. My parents told me about that so I always had a
fascination with it.
Mrs. Ward was born in Tennessee and she was an artist. She went to New York City and
she came from New York City to Bradenton. No one seems to know why or how she
arrived here. She had been recently divorced. She had two children and probably not a lot
of money, so I don’t know how she got started. She settled in two houses in the northeast
corner of Manatee Avenue and 26th Street. There’s a big new bank building there now.
She started looking for clay and she found clay right at the end of 27th Street in the river.
Libby is aware of that clay deposit also. Another favorite subject for me to think about
and talk about is the Fogarty family. Fogarty would bring the clay up to her pottery and
the children would clean it and prepare it for making all this different pottery.
Now maybe you can think of something else, but outside of agricultural products or
turpentine, that sort of thing, probably this pottery was one of our first manufacturing
pursuits. I can’t think of a whole lot else that was being made on a commercial basis. Of
course blacksmiths were making things for farmers and that sort of thing. Carpenters
were building houses and furniture for people, but Mrs. Ward was doing this and
marketing it.
She started in about 1915; I think she arrived here in 1914. She started actually making
the pottery around 1915. She hired local artists to paint on it. Some came from New York
and some professional artists actually came from other countries to paint it. She
conducted the business there at the property on Manatee Avenue for about five years.
Mr. Graake came along. She had probably met him in New York. He came from New
York. He was from Denmark. He and his son came here and bought the business from
Mrs. Ward around 1920. She then moved to Orlando, to the Orlando Pottery.
I’m going to do some show–and--tell in just a little while. We’ll look at some actual
pieces of what she produced and what Mr. Graake produced. Then I’ve also brought
some Silver Springs examples because Mr. Graake’s son migrated to Silver Springs and
started that pottery there.
All the pottery we are talking about was really for the tourist trade. It was fragile, because
Mrs. Ward did not have high heat to cure it. She had cured it in a kerosene oven and
therefore did not get it hot enough to work the glazes. So it’s all unglazed on the outside.
The vases and other objects that were going to contain liquids, they were painted with a
varnish and paint inside to make them waterproof. That worked for some time. Most of
that is wearing out now.
So this pottery, after Mrs. Ward worked there on Manatee Avenue for a while, she got it
going and as happens in a lot of things, some of the men in town got quite interested in
marketing this. They formed a corporation. She got involved with them and I kind of
wonder if that was the reason she just sold out here and went to Orlando.
But they moved her downtown and the business expanded. They had a storeroom and
they marketed it all over the country. I’m not sure how successful it was but it was a
going business for quite some time.
It’s extremely rare. I’ve been interested in it for many, many years and I’ve searched all
over the country and I have never found a piece on my own. I have ten pieces of it and
most of it was through people who knew I was trying to acquire it and they referred me to
it. One piece I bought from Larry Roberts. He has a Florida memorabilia business like an
antique store at Micanopy. Larry collected Florida memorabilia since he was seven. He’s
got Indian and everything else you can think of. I believe he’s back open now but he
published an article in, I think it was, Antique Digest about 15 years ago and that’s when
the interest really sparked. Up to that time you could buy it in a garage sale or somewhere
when you saw it for a few dollars.
When Mrs. Ward was producing it, sometimes you will find a piece like some of mine
that will have the price on the bottom of it. It was just a few dollars or cents. But after
Larry published his article, it started really going up. I don’t know the exact connection,
but I’m sure that Larry was buying for Dr. Frankel. He wrote the book, and when he
wrote the book, it really took off. This is about Florida pottery, but in his book he features
a whole chapter about Mrs. Ward’s pottery and the Graake pottery. [Alfred R. Frankel,
Potters in Paradise: a collector's guide to makers, marks, and history of old Florida
pottery, 1859-1966 . St. Pete Beach, Fla. : Blue Dome Press, c1999]
The cover sheet there is all pictures of pottery that is in the Historical Park, the Manatee
Village Historical Park. That is the largest collection that I know of and there are
probably over twenty pieces. Some of it may still be owned by Dr. Frankel. At one time
we had a number of his pieces on loan. Then he put it on a tour of Florida and he came
and got most of his. There are people who knew we had the collection there and have
added to it over the years.
Originally, you’ll see the painting on it. All of her pottery was hand painted by mostly
local artists. When Mr. Graake took it over, they started producing unpainted pottery
which could be marketed to artists who wanted to do their own work. Now, I’ve never
seen an example of that, but we were lucky at the park, some woman from Tampa gave
us a large vase or urn that still has the top, which is really rare, to find those two together.
And it’s something unpainted, just molded and put out there and somehow she had it, and
now we have it at the Park.
[He open’s Dr. Frankel’s book] Here’s something I’d like to show you, before we go
further; a couple of pictures. This is Mrs. Ward. So you have a picture of what she was
like. She was very young when she came here.
Question: What did you say the time frame was?
Nick Baden: She came here in 1914. She started making her pottery around 1915. She ran
the business there until 1920 when Mr. Graake, probably at her suggestion, came down
and took it over, and she moved on to Orlando and continued making pottery. What
happened after that I’m not sure.
After Dr. Frankel wrote this book, the pottery left what I can pay for. I’m going to show
you some examples and it is so rare, and there are such avid collectors here in Florida,
and now around the country, it goes on the internet and a candlestick will immediately go
up to over $800. I keep cautioning them down at the Park that maybe we should take a
little bit better care of what we have there, because we have about 20 pieces.
Well, I think that now we’ll go and do the show-and-tell pieces. It’s some of my favorite
part. Rather than just put it all out here, [he indicates the small table in front of him] I
thought it would be more fun to unwrap it. It’s not in any particular order. I could
probably have been better prepared but my passion is kind of in doing this; but on the
other side is our Florida environment, which to me has an historic side to it also. I stayed
very late for a talk by John Thaxton, who’s a Commissioner in Sarasota, who has been
very successful in the environmental business in Sarasota and he came to speak to a lot of
us. I thought that I might add one thought that I got from him, with regard to the Mansion
[Ellenton’s Gamble Mansion was slated for closing by Governor Rick Scott for budget
reasons] and the fact that our environment and our historic resources are facing hard
times right now, by the folks who are starting to run Florida. He said, “Know your
subject. Then, stay in the game. You’re gonna lose a lot of times”, but his example was:
“I go fishing all the time. Sometimes I don’t catch a fish. But if I don’t have my line in
the water, I’ll never catch a fish.” So, you’ll go home and now it mentions some
addresses here [from the Recent News section of the Historical Society’s webpage] but –
and you don’t want to put too much heat on them – but I would talk to these local people.
We have a brand new representative. You talk to them sorta on an equal [basis] but say:
“Look, I do not expect the Mansion to be closed. Now, you figure out how we can keep it
open. We do not accept the idea that it is going to be closed.” Not any more than the
other side of me wants to accept that we are going to close these preserves. It’s just part
of what we do. I don’t know why we’ve gone so off course.
Let’s unwrap some pottery now! Most of this, Ina [Mrs. Nick Baden] has acquired for
me, although she likes part of it too. One day I was doing this talk and I’d wrapped all my
stuff up in newspaper. I got really chastised from a woman in the audience, how I was
ruining my pottery and getting newsprint all over it. It sort of set me aback. I didn’t know
what to do. I remembered this time – don’t wrap it up in any newspaper! [He finished
unwrapping a vase] This is unmarked, but when we put it all out here you’ll feel like an
expert. Because once you see this pottery, you can recognize it anywhere. So a good bit
of it will be unmarked. [He displays the bottom of the vase to the audience]
When Mrs. Ward first started making this stuff, she scratched in the bottom “Manatee
River Art Pottery”. I don’t have a piece that is scratched, that is a really early one. Later
on, she would mark it with a rubber stamp, when they were producing a lot and it was
being shipped all over the country. It will be just a rubber stamp that says “Manatee River
Art Pottery”.
When Graake bought it, he stamped it with a rubber stamp and it usually says “H. Graake
and Son, Manatee River Art Pottery”. So you may see any of those. This one [he holds up
the first vase again, a classic shape with a peacock and white column] is one of the better
ones that I have. It is just a nice clay, nice shape, and nice painting. This is signed by the
artist. I don’t think I have any that are signed. I’ll have to look them over as I take them
out.
Question: Nicki? Were they made in a mold?
Nick Baden: No, they were made on a potter’s wheel. We have pictures of them
operating the wheel. All of Mrs. Ward’s wheels were hand operated until she moved to
the downtown location, where they had one that had an electric motor and the others were
still hand operated.
Sometimes one piece won’t be that outstanding. But when you get it all together I think it
has a really nice look to it. [He unwraps a tall, cylindrical vase with water and palm
trees] They are nearly all Florida scenes. There are a lot of peacocks. Evidently in the,
around 1915 through the 1920s, peacocks were popular in art. They nearly all had water
and some had palm trees. There are also some very nice ones with some hunting scenes.
There were vases and candlesticks and then there were these little bowls. Later on they
started putting candied grapefruit rind in. This is an example of one of the bowls. Take a
good look at the inside because I’m going to come back and tie that up with a little story.
Doris [Wright] is laughing like maybe she’s heard me do this before.
[Laughter from audience]
Voice from the head table: We didn’t get to see that. Bring it back.
[He unwraps a smaller vase with a painted butterfly motif] O.K., here’s another little item
with a sob story behind it. This one is “Manatee River Pottery, Bradentown Florida”. I
think Ina got this piece for me. It was a Christmas present. We used to go to Atlanta for
every Christmas. Then we would go to her parents over in Alabama. After they died we
still went to Atlanta but we had Christmas in a motel room. [Laughter from audience]
Anyway, she insisted on taking this. I said: “No, no, let’s don’t take it.” But it wound up
in Atlanta so coming back, I think, I wrapped it all up in my jacket and packed it away.
When I got home I forgot it was in the jacket. [Loud groans from audience] It broke into
about 25 or 30 pieces. My first thought was to just sweep it up and forget about it. But
Ina used to go to a seminar in England. She met this person who does this for a museum.
So she actually came and stayed with us for a while. So Ina said; “No, put it all together
and we’ll send it to her.” You can see inside. In England, they don’t try to cover up their
repairs. So if a piece has been repaired, a piece of pottery, when really ethical people who
do that, you can see inside the damaged piece, but on the outside – look how smooth that
repair is! So if you break a piece, it is not lost forever. Although you would have to be a
friend of Warrick. Perhaps she’d come and stay with you a few weeks.
[Laughter from audience]
O.K. Here’s another bowl and you can see that this one has been painted with that varnish
and paint mixture that she used to put on the inside to waterproof them. This is a frequent
pattern that you see. I assume that those are meant to represent oranges. They come pretty
close to orange decorations.
Question: Are the pictures on all the bowls the same?
Nick Baden: No, no. They are all hand done so you get a variety.
Voice from audience: Don’t you imagine that the paint back then had lead in it?
Nick Baden: Well, yeah. I’m full of that myself. That’s why I’m a little crazy. [Laughter
from audience] I have an excuse for being crazy.
Voice from head table: On that little bowl, is it brown on the top and lighter on the
bottom?
Nick Baden: Well, they’ve put something in there. [ He finished unwrapping a tall
candlestick] Now here is a candlestick with birds and southern flowers. Now this is an
unmarked piece too. But when you start looking at them together, [he indicates all the
unwrapped pottery on the table ] you’ve got to say: “Yeah, that’s Graake Pottery”.
[He has unwrapped a small, dark, vase] O.K. This is something very different, you see?
Now, you can quickly see that is not the same stuff. But it has some of the same form.
[He picks up one of the earlier, slightly larger vases] Doesn’t that kinda match that one?
You can see a kinship there.
[He holds up that small dark vase] This was Mr. Graake’s son. They think Mr. Graake
would have been too old to start a new pottery in Silver Springs. So they think it was his
son who did most of this. But he started the Silver Springs Pottery and they produced just
jillions of these. They are all over the country. That might be an $18 dollar piece, but you
can afford it. It’s fairly common but it has a connection to what we are looking at here at
the front. I think I have a couple of pieces of that today to show you.
Question from audience: Was he firing it at a higher temperature?
Nick Baden: I don’t know. I don’t know about the firing on that. One of my favorites
here for the plain. This is Graake and its stamped Bradentown, Florida. I like the form on
it, I like the colors and I like the painting on it.
Question from audience: Are these all displayed in your home?
Nick Baden: Yes. They’re all there. Well, they’re up kinda high. Already the kids get into
everything. [Laughter from audience ] But the worst part is, people come to clean or
decorate. One of these [Here he points to the tall candlestick] I saw was tipped over. And
a broken bottom.
[He holds a newly unwrapped bowl upside down] Here’s an interesting one. This one
says just “Manatee River Pottery, Bradentown, Florida”. But this is Manatee River
Pottery, Inc. That’s when you know that the money guys in this town wanted to get in on
this deal. You know, talked her into forming a corporation. That’s probably when she
started second-thinking what she was doing. This one [the bowl] is marked $1.65. I don’t
know at what point that was put on there. That might have been its original cost.
[After another unwrapping, this time a small vase] This is my first piece. This is “H.A.
Graake and Company Art Pottery”. The price on it is either 29 cents or 89 cents. My
price was much more. [Laughter from audience] It’s got the orange decoration that he
had. I bought this from Larry Roberts. It’s probably one that Dr. Frankel rejected. I
always had a feeling. I don’t know for sure but thought that Larry was working for Dr.
Frankel.
One other thing. You can see the difference in the quality. These folks kind of went back
and forth. She was working in Orlando and the clay is smoother and lighter. You can tell
the difference with your eyes shut. You see the contrast there [as he holds the new little
vase against the first vase he uncovered].
Now, the fun part for me, and as I say, history is sort of the continuity. It just keeps
going. We just put the puzzle together a little more. I’d always been trying to find exactly
where she made the pottery because I figured there would be shards around. There’s just
a tiny bit of Dr. Sugg in me, you know, he used to just go and do whatever he wanted. He
even got away with cutting an eagle’s nest down. He wanted to put it in a museum. I
never went that far. I had taken my sounding rod and gone around a few spots over there
and I never found anything. Then I went to Dr. Frankel’s lecture, he had done much
better research than I did. I found a closer location. It’s just about where the drive-in
window is for that new bank. When I saw them tearing the houses down, I went in there
one night with my sounding rod. In a few minutes, I hit this stuff. So I got a little bit of it
and then I came back and talked to Mike Carter who was building it and he said – I knew
him from the South Florida Museum – I said: “Mike, I want to go in there and see what’s
there.” He said: “O.K., you’ve got the backhoe for two hours. You can go in there and do
what you want but that’s it, because I’ve got to get this going.” I had the backhoe driver
and the tractor for two hours and we turned it upside down and we found some more
stuff. Quite a bit more. Some of my friends who are real archeologists went nuts. “Oh,
you should never have done that! You should have called us up.” Well, let me tell you
something, if I hadn’t done it, we wouldn’t have had anything. I thought they would be
really excited about what I’d found, but they really put me down. [Laughter from
audience] Anyway it was great fun for me. I missed out on Montegue Tallant doing all
this stuff. But then I got to do a little bit myself. If you really like this stuff you can
imagine how thrilling it was to have the sounding rod in it and really find this stuff. I’m
sure that Montegue was the same way.
[He holds two small pieces together with a flower motif] These are two pieces. I think
they were trying to do some tiles. That’s what I found about three years ago when I
started digging there. I suspect there was quite a bit more in the area. I don’t know where
she dumped everything. And I think in the property that is just north of this site, the dump
might have been there. I don’t think I really found the dump. From what I found I suspect
that it was what was left over in the houses when she abandoned them and maybe was
swept out. I the old days we buried a lot of stuff. If it was garbage we burned it but if it
was not we buried it. So within this shard-rubble I found a light socket and some other
miscellaneous stuff. It just looked like somebody had swept it up and buried it.
[He picks up the broken bottom of a candlestick] The one this one really matches up with
is the broken one I didn’t bring. It would have been the base of a candlestick.
[Picking up a larger shard] Now this is why I wanted you to note the bottom of this bowl.
Looking at this, you can see the hand marks on that shard match up with the bottom of
this bowl. So this piece, evidently something happened to it. During the firing, or
whatever, it never gained a life as a bowl. We have it as a shard. I cannot tell if it was or
wasn’t but it definitely has the finger marks of a bowl.
Now, after they finished up the bank building, there was another man who was the
president of the bank, and I totally apologize. I said; “Look, I have all this stuff. I’d like
to have it displayed on that site.” So I got him one of these books which I got at the South
Florida Museum. I don’t know if we have it in the gift shop at the Historical Park or not.
Anyway, I got the interior decorators this book. So they matched these shards up with
these pieces in pictures. They took pictures and then these shards, they are in shadow
boxes back near their conference room.
QUESTION: How many pieces did the pottery produce?
Nick Baden: Marketing was handled through the corporation. How much they produced I
don’t know.
QUESTION: Is that clay all up and down the river?
Nick Baden: I don’t think so. I think it is just in certain areas.
QUESTION: Is that the same as gumbo, that clay that we call gumbo?
Nick Baden: I don’t know. Libby knows more about the clay than I do. I’ve never seen
any in the raw state.
Libby Warner: There was clay in the river near where I was born. [Partly inaudible]
There was about four of us in the neighborhood. We played with each other. We walked
that shoreline right in front of our house. The dirt got bigger, higher and we stopped there
and started digging in it just for the fun of it and we came upon clay. From then on I had
clay to play with.
QUESTION: If we should find a piece like that, how much should we expect to pay for
it?
Nick Baden: Well, gee! I was going to look at the internet, but as I say I got to talking at
my environmental society last night and I forgot to check. But as I say, the last time I
looked, that was up to $800. [He holds up the painted candlestick] That was before
everything went down. I doubt if things like this went down much. Guys like Dr. Frankel;
he can probably still afford to pay the price if he wants it. You’re talking about several
hundred dollars even for the smaller pieces. And then, if you got a nice piece like this, [he
holds up the first peacock vase] gee, it might be in the thousands.
Some pottery collector called me and talked to me about a piece they had that was
standing up like this [He demonstrates by holding his hand table-top high]. The starting
price was like $10,000. It was probably a one of a kind production, maybe something for
a store. I don’t know what it was.
PRESIDENT JEANNE AKERS: You promised to tell a little bit more about your family.
NICK BADEN: I’m here because of Doris “War Between the States” Wright. My
Southern gene pool made cotton gins in Hamish (?) City, Louisiana. They were wiped out
by the war. Some stayed but some came here. They came to Cedar Key by train and then
they got the boat on down here. That’s the Gullett side. I’m kin to -- Actually some of
you are more my family than some of them are. My family are so many and so extended,
Doris and Libby and Pam, and (?) and Lou are really my family. There’s so many of
them here now I don’t even know all of them. Well, they came here because of the war
and everything being destroyed there. Florida, here, we weren’t hurt at all, really except
a little at Gamble and a couple of other incidents. He was a surveyor and he was able to
survey for some of the other early people who were buying land here. They gave him a
piece of land off Terra Ceia Bay. He later on, after he liked that, he homesteaded an
island out there.
My Yankee side are Armstrongs. You know Armstrong Plumbing. There were nine
brothers who came here along with my grandmother who was a Baden, an Armstrong.
There are a jillion of them here. I don’t even know all of them. But the grandfather
Armstrong came along. He had a Union pension so they all worked for him.
I’ve got all their diaries. They would go every month and buy all their groceries. My
grandfather would get so much for hoeing orange trees or whatever. So that’s the way
my genes came to be here, really. That Armstrong, who was a little tiny guy, had entered
the Union forces with his uncle. They were having a hard time up North and they weren’t
so much into the issues as looking for a paycheck. I have his diary, where he was
shuffling all over the country. He was so young that he wasn’t fighting much. He was
mainly driving wagons. He’s the one that came here with the whole clan. He had done
blockade duty in Florida. He liked it, so that’s why he came here.