A Charlestown Sugar Bowl

The rediscovery of a redware masterpiece

Justin Thomas
Photos by the author unless otherwise credited

oday, what is important in American pottery is determined

by the eye of the beholder. It may be the desire for a
certain object or a specific maker, but it could also be as
simple as the aesthetic qualities of the form, skill and glaze. If
history has proven anything, it is that what was overlooked
in the past can be seen a highly significant today. Such as
the case with a piece of eighteenth-century slip-decorated
red earthenware that sold at a Tim
Gould sale in Augusta, Maine, in
November of 2014.

The 18th-century red earthenware

sugar bowl probably made in
Charlestown between 1740
and 1765, at Tim
Goulds auction.

The bowl
Presented as a doublehandled lidded jar, it
was also described as a
sugar bowl. Though it
would certainly have been
used for storage in a New
England household, the
aesthetics of its form and
decoration suggest that it
was probably intended for use
in a dining room rather than a
working kitchen. Its use as a welldecorated sugar bowl would have
lifted it above the regularly produced
utilitarian wares such as storage crocks
and chamber pots that constituted the main
output of eighteenth-century New England
potters. Both similar examples that still survive
and archeologically recovered fragments show that
this handled bowl belongs with a minority of New
England pottery. It is formal rather than utilitarian, and
that is what makes it important.
Its slip decoration relates to the decoration on a red
earthenware chamber pot and a red earthenware porringer. It is
difficult to determine whether these products were made at the
Parker Pottery or by another business in Charlestown, but it is
encouraging to see a decoration that is not really seen anywhere
else in New England during the same period, and is probably
unique to Charlestown.
Massachusetts potter Rick Hamelin demonstrated at the late
Don Carpentiers Dish Camp (at Historic Eastfield Village in
Nassau, N.Y., in 2014) that the curved slip decoration was actually
applied by a stamp. Rick removed a card from his wallet, bent
it into a curve and then dipped it into slip. He then used it as a
stamp to apply the decoration.
The bowls provenance was good it was reportedly found
in a home in Winchester, Mass., in 1976, which is only about
eight miles northwest of Boston. The pot was also said to have
been handled by Nina Fletcher Little, who is widely known today
for her massively important collection of Americana kept at
historic Cogswells Grant in Essex, Mass. The Fletcher Collection

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February 2016 Antiques Journal Page 37

includes a number of important

examples of red earthenware and
stoneware that are displayed in
period cupboards, on top shelves
and hidden elsewhere in just
about every imaginable corner in
the Essex home.
When I took a private tour of the
now museum with my mother a few
years ago, we were surprised to see
the importance of this collection that
went far beyond eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century New England
pottery. Reminiscing about my visit
today, I am surprised with how Nina
Fletcher Little chose to display red
earthenware through the various
rooms in her home. Traditionally,
utilitarian pottery was kept where it
was used, in places like a kitchen or
a cellar; however, red earthenware
was displayed at Cogswells Grant in
the dining room, the bedrooms, and
the kitchen and, even elsewhere
in the house.
I have heard todays longtime
antique dealers tell me that red
earthenware never really appeared
at the prominent antique shows in
the 1960s or the 1970s, but it did
begin to creep into the shows in
the 1980s, whereas today, redware
is now regarded as an important
element in the field of Americana.
Nina Fletcher Little had the
foresight to see the importance in
utilitarian pottery before it achieved
its true recognition today. She also
anticipated the importance of the
bowl that sold at Tim Goulds sale
in Augusta, Maine, in 2014.
A few weeks before the sale, the
bowl was identified as an extremely
rare product that was likely
produced in the Charlestown, Mass.
potters industry before 1775. On
the day of the sale, the interest was
great. National buyers were bidding
on the phone, but the lot eventually
fell to the Sheffield, Mass. antiques
dealer Samuel Herrup for just under
$15,000.

Charlestown pottery
Historically, this is a significant
bowl. The Charlestown pottery
business began in the 1630s when
the English-trained potter, Philip
Drinker, emigrated from England
to Charlestown. This is believed to
be the first known potters business
in New England. Remains from
Drinkers pottery were excavated
in the archaeology component of
Bostons infamous Big Dig (the
burying of I-93 and other highways
deep under the city center) in the

1980s. All that could be interpreted

from the remains is that the Drinker
Pottery made every day utilitarian
wares. But this was the business
that sparked the eighteenth-century
pottery industry in Charlestown
that saw more than 40 regularlyemployed potters in the 100
years leading up to the American
Revolution.
The most prominent business
in the eighteenth-century in
Charlestown
was
probably
the Parker Pottery, which was
established around 1717 by Isaac
Parker and his wife, Grace Parker.
The Parkers owned a beautiful
home on Charlestowns waterfront
with wonderful gardens. The
Massachusetts state archives also
tell us that the Parkers owned slaves
who most likely participated at the
family pottery business.
The Parkers owned a retail
shop in the City Square area of
Charlestown, where they sold their
pottery and possibly other supplies
for the local homeowners. Near
the Parkers store was the Three
Cranes Tavern, which was originally
built as the The Great House for
Governor John Winthrop in the
1630s; however, he soon left for
Boston and, the building became
known as Longs Ordinary before
it changed names again to The
Three Cranes Tavern.
The Parkers had an interesting
connection to a related potter,
Samuel Marshall, who lived in
Portsmouth, N.H. The Parkers
son, John Parker, was a potter in
Charlestown, who worked at the
family pottery, although, period
records reveal that he also worked
at various other potters businesses
in Charlestown in the 1740s and the
1750s. According to John Parkers
daybook, owned by the Baker
Library at Harvard University, the
potter Samuel Marshall purchased
wholesale orders of Charlestownmade pottery from the Parker
Pottery that were shipped to his
business located near the Piscataqua
River in Portsmouth. We can
assume that Marshall sold both this
Charlestown-made red earthenware
and his locally produced pottery
in Portsmouth before his death in
1749.
The
Charlestown
potteries
can be seen as a focal industry in
New England before 1775. The list
of potters is long: Bodge, Collier,
Cutler, Drinker, Edes, Frothingham,
Harris, Kettle or Kettel, Larkin, Lord,

Page 38 Antiques Journal February 2016

18th-century slip-decorated, red earthenware pan recovered from an

18th -century privy at the Three Cranes Tavern in Charlestown, Mass.
Courtesy Boston Archaeology Department, West Roxbury, Mass.

John Parkers Potters Daybook at the Baker Library at Harvard

University. The Daybook accounts for much of Parkers work and
transactions in the late 1740s and the 1750s. Photo Courtesy Baker
Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

18th-century slip-decorated chamber pot recovered from an 18thcentury privy at the Three Cranes Tavern in Charlestown, Mass.
Courtesy Boston Archaeology Department, West Roxbury, Mass.

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Lundy, Manning, Newell, Parker, Penny,

Pierce, Potter, Powers, Smiley, Stanley,
Symmes, Thorp, Wade and Webber
all ran potteries in Charlestown in the
seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries.
Sadly, the Charlestown industry came to
an abrupt ending and it was eventually
sacrificed for Americas independence
at the start of the American Revolution.
On the morning of June 17, 1775,
British troops burned Charlestown and
its potteries to the ground at the Battle
of Bunker Hill. The industry never
recovered. A few potters returned,
but the industry never regained the
prominence it once had.
Fortunately,
the
archaeology
undertaken in the 1980s before the Big
Dig broke ground recovered some of
the lost Charlestown pottery industry
that had been all but forgotten. Huge
numbers of sherds and kiln furniture
were recovered, many from the site of
the Parker Pottery. The archeology also
revealed five privies, which also served
as trash pits, from the Three Cranes
Tavern. One of the privies dated from
the late seventeenth century and the rest
from various periods in the eighteenthcentury before 1775. The recovered
sherds were not only of locally produced
red earthenware, but they also included
imported products.

Left: The Charlestown bowl shown again with (right) an 18th-century Charlestown porringer
recovered from a privy at the Three Cranes Tavern in Charlestown.

In retrospect
Charlestown-made
pottery
is
exceedingly rare and this sugar bowl
is believed to be the finest known
Charlestown pot. Currently, there are
fewer than ten surviving intact examples
known today, in both private collectors
and national museums.
The Charlestown potters did not
have an easy life: They had to deal with
the conflicts between British soldiers
and the American Patriots before 1775,
the Intolerable Acts in the 1770s, the
start of the American Revolution and
eventually the Battle of Bunker Hill.
Its not surprising today that so little
has survived despite an industry that
produced large numbers of utilitarian
wares for the Boston area and elsewhere
in New England for more than 100
years. It also seems that this industry
was attempting to replicate some of the
great eighteenth-century English ceramic
industries before its untimely death.
Winchester, Mass., where this bowl
was found, is only a few miles from
Charlestown. This makes me wonder
whether the bowl may have witnessed
the birth of the American Revolution
only to be forgotten until it made
a public appearance at Tim Goulds
auction in Augusta, Maine, in 2014.

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Left: Charlestown bowl. Right: Charlestown chamber pot recovered from an 18th-century privy at
the Three Cranes Tavern in Charlestown. The curved decorations resemble those on the sugar bowl.

Small 18th-century slip-decorated red

earthenware creamer with typical
Charlestown decoration. The creamer was
discovered by Massachusetts author Lura
Woodside Watkins some decades ago.
Courtesy Old Sturbridge Village, Sturbridge,
Mass.

The curves on the Charlestown sugar bowl and

other pots as reproduced by Massachusetts Potter
Rick Hamelin at Dish Camp in Historic Eastfield
Village in New York in June of 2015.

February 2016 Antiques Journal Page 39