LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER FOUR

      Blame the clay. As an 1879 history of Hancock County explains, “The traveler who journeys in the cars upon the Ohio shore or upon one of the numberless steamers that float upon our beautiful river will no doubt observe quite a number of huge piles of clay of a bluish gray color, that lies at the foot of the hills along the West Virginia shore. Such a settlement upon the Rhine in Germany or upon the Tyne in England would have a history of a thousand years or more, made interesting by a hundred legends of love and war; while here, fifty years will antedate all this industry and nineteen twentieths of all this population.”

      William Thompson built the first true pottery in West Virginia during the 1850s. The pottery sat three hundred yards below what would one day become the Newell Bridge. Thompson and his hires made yellow ware—thick, sturdy tableware colored yellow and striped with blue or cream. They used water from the hills and clay from the riverbed. The clay was clean and had a nice hand.

      This was not news. A mile across the river in East Liverpool, Ohio, potteries had been operating since the 1840s. Entrepreneurs smelled opportunity in the clay and the river, no one more so than English-born James Bennet, who built the first regional pottery in 1839. More immigrants followed, mostly from Staffordshire. In no time, potteries dotted the river like moored barges, their beehive kiln chimneys squatting and sputtering smoke at regular intervals, as if they were giant towering pipes sucked from below.

      A gold rush followed. Towns that were once described by visitors as “forlorn” became hot spots. “East Liverpool is full of clay and coal and contains about 700 inhabitants,” wrote one potter in an 1849 letter home to England. “There are markets open to receive every cup of ware that is made. It is impossible for you to starve.”

      As industry grew, social programs lagged. In a rush to capitalize on the clay, schools and city services fell behind. In 1881, only 800 of the eligible 2,200 children attended school. The rest were working with their families in the potteries, where wages were $13.96 a week in 1887, two and a half times what the same potters earned in England and about $4.00 more than other tradesmen. Children were essential to the success of a pottery. Making china is labor-intensive. Jigger crews, groups who took clay from its raw form to the mold, were often made up of three people from the same family, who were paid as a team. A child was a cheap way to get the light labor done without squandering a third of the take. In 1880, 12 percent of all pottery workers were women. Fifty-two percent were children, half of them under age sixteen.

      As railroad expansion continued along the Ohio River, materials and additional labor became easier to import. China lines expanded and potteries converted to more mass production. By 1900, East Liverpool, Ohio, was known as “America’s Crockery City,” and the population of the valley swelled tenfold. From 1870 to 1910, the numbers grew from two thousand to twenty thousand in East Liverpool alone. Ninety percent of the population worked in the ceramics industry.

      It was an unusual scenario. Nowhere else in the country did one trade so completely dominate the daily life of a community. The potteries provided more than jobs: They functioned as social hubs, sponsoring baseball teams, dances, picnics. They brought in circuses and parades and shows at the Ceramic Theater. Conversation was about potteries and pottery technology. The newspapers ran a daily column called “Pottery News,” which included reports on accidents (fires usually), kiln repair, and the ever-threatening competition from the Far East.

      Hardships were rarely mentioned. Potters liked their work and complained little, even though each position had its extreme drawbacks. A jiggerman threw clay onto a mold and pressed it into shape. He was assisted by a mold runner, who carried the pressed clay from point A to point B, and a finisher, often a woman or child, who rounded edges and sponged the faces of the clay for blemishes. A good jigger team produced about 2,760plates a day, the mold runner walking about fifteen miles before his nine-hour shift ended, carrying over 34,000 pounds of clay.

      The clay itself had to be bubble-free before use, and so workers had to be capable of lifting one hundred pounds of raw clay, which they would cut in half with brass wire and then smack together to force out the air. The clay started as tubes thick as watermelons and long as a man’s torso. These sat like weeping tree stumps, two by two, on tables until the flattener snatched one up and smacked out the air, burping it into submission.

      After pressing, a kiln placer would put the uncooked ware into protective containers, called “saggers,” and then stack the saggers as high as eighteen feet in a kiln. Saggers were carried atop a kiln placer’s head to make the process of loading the kiln faster. To keep the weight from crushing their skulls, they rolled up cloth and wore it headband-style, calling them “kilnman’s doughnuts.” After firing, kiln drawers emptied the saggers, spending their whole shift hoisting burning-hot ware from kilns, their hands wrapped only loosely with cheesecloth.

      There were also cup turners, who added feet and pedestals to china, and casters, who made sugars, sauce-boats, and other types of hollowware. Mold makers did just that, peaking production at one hundred pieces, because if used beyond that, a plaster of Paris mold would have sucked up so much moisture from the clay that it would begin to dissolve. Handlers stuck handles on cups, brushers smoothed clay, and dippers glazed baked ware. And then there were packers, coal haulers, and myriad specialty positions, all of which required strength and speed to make items that, once done, would shatter at the slightest impact.

      As the years passed, a new generation of potters was born in the valley. Time didn’t

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