Early New England Potters and Their Wares

Lura Woodside Watkins

Description

This book is the result of more than fifteen years of research. The study has been carried on, partly in libraries and town records, partly by conferences with descendants of potters and others familiar with their history, and partly by actual digging on the sites of potteries. The excavation method has proved most successful in showing what our New England potters were making at an early period now almost unrepresented by surviving specimens.

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des arts visuels
• Massachusetts Bay Colony

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 23 mars 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781446546994
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

EARLY NEW ENGLAND POTTERS AND THEIR WARES
Lura Woodside Watkins
Printed in the United States of America
TO MALCOLM, my son whose sympathetic understanding has been an inspiration
Preface
This book is the result of more than fifteen years of research. The study has been carried on, partly in libraries and town records, partly by conferences with descendants of potters and others familiar with their history, and partly by actual digging on the sites of potteries. The excavation method has proved most successful in showing what our New England potters were making at an early period now almost unrepresented by surviving specimens.
Over all these years I have had the willing assistance of many persons, whom I here wish to thank publicly. Two of them have been of immeasurable help in forwarding the publication of the book: Mr. Curt H. Reisinger and Mr. David McCord. To Mr. Reisinger I owe a boundless debt of gratitude for his very practical aid and to Mr. McCord my devoted thanks for the time he has spent and the moral support he has given when the end was uncertain.
Some friends have co perated by research in records or by the gift of documentary material or notes which they themselves have made. Among these are Miss Margaret H. Jewell, of Portland, Maine; Prof. Frederick H. Norton, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Mr. Arthur W. Clement, of Brooklyn, New York; Miss Edna M. Hoxie, of Berkley, Massachusetts; Mrs. H. H. Buxton, of Peabody, Massachusetts; Mr. Albert N. Peterson, of Providence, Rhode Island; Mr. Austin G. Packard, of Ashfield, Massachusetts; and Mrs. Mabel M. Swan, of Scituate, Massachusetts. In this field the historical societies have also been most helpful. I am especially grateful to Mr. Fred W. Bushby, of the Peabody Historical Society, for the loan of a large collection of notes, to Mr. F. W. Hutt, of the Old Colony Historical Society at Taunton, and to Mr. Elmer M. Hunt, of the New Hampshire Historical Society.
For information freely given and for aid in locating sites I am indebted to Mrs. Helen F. Adams, Mr. Horace Bardwell, Mrs. Harriet E. Brown, Mrs. Carrie B. Carpenter, Mrs. Ada Hunt Chase, Miss Mary Persis Crafts, Mrs. W. J. Craig, Mrs. Elizabeth Davis, Mrs. Kelsey Flower, Miss Helen Holley, Miss Annie Stilphen, Miss Daisy Waterhouse, and Miss Grace Wheeler. Mr. John Norton Brooks and Mr. George A. Risley, both descendants of potters, have contributed much by the loan of original account books and the gift of photographs.
Especial thanks are due those patient people who have cheerfully allowed us to dig up their lawns and yards. For this I am particularly under obligation to Miss Louise Hanson and to Mr. and Mrs. Chester T. Cutler and their young son, Thomas Allen, who recovered at Danvers the earliest slip-decorated shard that can be attributed to any known potter and place in America. The trustees of Ravenswood Park in Gloucester were also most kind in permitting excavation on their land.
A few devotees have done the hard work of digging. First and foremost among them is my husband, Charles Hadley Watkins, whose enthusiasm has been almost as great as my own. Others who have put their backs into it are our nephew Thomas P. Watkins and our good friends Charles S. Livingstone and Richard H. Marchant. My gratitude to them all!
And lastly I would like to thank Russell B. Harding, my photographer, who has put untold hours and energy into the making of fine illustrations for the book, and to Forrest Orr, who has subordinated a great artistic talent to the business of making the line drawings in Chapter XXIX .
Lura Woodside Watkins
Contents

Introduction
I
Techniques
II
Seventeenth-Century Potters
III
James Kettle s Shard Pile
IV
The Provincial Potters of Charlestown
V
A Potter s Daybook
VI
A Woman Introduces Stoneware
VII
Redware Potting from Boston to the Cape
VIII
Excavations on the Bayley Sites of 1723-1799
IX
The Osborns of Danvers and Other Essex County Potters
X
The Quaker Potters of Bristol County
XI
Stoneware Potting in Eastern Massachusetts
XII
Some Potteries of Central and Western Massachusetts
XIII
The Whately and Ashfield Group
XIV
Pioneer Craftsmen of New Hampshire
XV
The Clarks of Lyndeboro and Concord
XVI
North of Concord
XVII
Redware Potters of Vermont
XVIII
Vermont Stoneware Potteries
XIX
Early Maine Potteries
XX
The Maine Industry After 1800
XXI
Early Connecticut Redware and the Goshen Group
XXII
The States Family of Greenwich and Stonington
XXIII
Potters of New London County
XXIV
Hartford and New Haven Potteries
XXV
Pots and Dishes of Norwalk
XXVI
Rhode Island
XXVII
Bennington and Kindred Developments
XXVIII
The Art Potteries
XXIX
Redware Forms
APPENDICES
I
Documents Relating to the Parkers of Charlestown
II
Check List of New England Potters
III
Bibliography
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
INDEX
PLATES
EARLY NEW ENGLAND POTTERS AND THEIR WARES
Introduction
New England pottery falls into four categories: first, common red earthenware fashioned from native clay; second, stoneware, made of materials brought from outside the New England states; third, wares of buff or white body cast in molds for mass production, typified by Fenton s Bennington output; fourth, decorative pottery designed by trained artists. This book is primarily concerned with the first two classifications-the work of the traditional potters. For the sake of completeness, however, chapters on the later developments have been added.
Since redware was the only type of pottery generally made here before the Revolution, it presents an unusual degree of interest to the historian and the artist. Its manufacture (in the old sense of handcraft) has been so far forgotten that in the next generation such knowledge as I have here assembled would have been lost forever. And yet, it is one of the very few folk arts that have been practiced by Anglo-Saxons on this side of the Atlantic.
The growth of this craft in New England was subjected to far different influences than was that of the Pennsylvania-German potters. When the Germans came to Pennsylvania, the country had been occupied for more than one hundred years. They brought with them a fully developed traditional art which they were free to express here as they had in their home land. In New England, potters arrived with the first contingents of the pioneer settlers and had to work under the most adverse conditions. Of necessity, their time was occupied in making utilitarian vessels. Although they had doubtless learned in England the arts and refinements of decoration, they had little opportunity to practice them here. The need for useful objects was greater than the urge to elaborate them. Thus, after two or three generations in the harsh life of the pioneer community, they lost the ability for conscious artistic expression in this medium. There is little play of fancy in the early decorated wares, such as they were, but rather an insistence upon the geometrical that is akin to contemporary Indian art.
Simple though New England redware may be, it is nevertheless sturdy and vigorous in form and it has a charm that is difficult to define. Lustrous glazes, soft colors, and shapes of good proportion combine to make a virile, handsome ware. Earthy by its very nature, with its suggestion of soil, leaves, and trees, it captures the essence of the early potter s environment. That its beauty is largely accidental makes it no less lovable: its variations are like the changes of Nature herself, never ending, ever yielding fresh enjoyment. It is truly an expression of simple people-men almost without conscious thought of art. Like them their pottery is strong, direct, stripped of pretense and foolish ornamentation. It was created to fill a demand, and, incidentally, to please those who came to buy.
Red earthenware is one of the least durable ceramic types. Porous and brittle, easily cracked and chipped, it has not survived in quantity sufficient to give more than the slightest hint of its once widespread use in New England. Unlike the finer English earthenware and porcelain owned by the colonists, it was intended for the humbler domestic purposes. It was a pottery for the kitchen and the dairy and, far more frequently than is supposed, for the table. The myth of the colonists having nothing but wood and pewter for tableware must be discounted. The wood and pewter have survived; the redware, except for shards in potters dumps, has not. Its cheapness and fragility contributed to its disappearance from the household effects that were so carefully handed on from one generation to another. Today there are to be found only occasional rare pieces from the eighteenth century and, except in fragmentary form, virtually none from earlier pioneer days. In fact, redware of any period is so little known that many persons have never become conscious of its existence. Neither the potters nor their wares hold a position in history commensurate with their one-time importance.
The list of New England potters is such a long one that it is little less than amazing to find almost no mention of them in historical records. Grist mills, saw mills, blacksmiths and shoemakers shops are noted over and over, but potteries almost never. Neither have our writers on American ceramics given us any appreciation of the extent of the potting industry. When one glances at the appended check list and sees the roster of two hundred and fifty or more potters who were working in New England before 1800 and of more than five hundred who were engaged in this craft in a small way before 1850, one comes to a realization that they have been neglected. Perhaps because the later craftsmen sold their wares from peddlers carts, a snobbish attitude towards them arose. Nevertheless, the earlier men frequently entered this trade from the finest and most respected families and they