CHAPTER 32
B e a u t y , U t i l i t y , G o o d Va l u e Majolica Made in Baltimore, Maryland EARL MARTIN
A
T THE UNITED S TATES POT TERS’ A S SOCI ATION convention in December 1908, the organization’s historian, Henry Brunt, delivered a eulogy for two of its members: “The most noted change that has occurred in the personnel of the potters of the United States was caused by the death of two old and noted potters—Mr. Edwin Bennett and Mr. D. F. Haynes. It is singular that they both came from Baltimore, that they were both successful potters, and that they had once been partners in business, and that both should die within the short period of a few weeks.”1 It was fitting that Brunt should be the one to give this address as he was a friend to both men and had worked with them at what were Baltimore’s leading potteries in the late nineteenth century: Edwin Bennett’s eponymous firm and Haynes’s Chesapeake Pottery. While the varied and rich production of these two manufacturers was well-known to Brunt’s audience in 1908, it is less so today—and their majolica wares, in particular, are little recognized (fig. 32.1). Edwin F I G . 3 2 . 1 . D. F. Haynes & Co., Chesapeake Pottery. “Bramble” ware, ca. 1882–86. Earthenware with majolica glazes, largest examples illustrated, tray: 1 ⅝ × 13 ⅜ × 9 ⅝ in. (4 × 34 × 24.5 cm); lemonade bowl: h. 6 ⅞ × diam. 13 ½ in. (17.5 × 34.3 cm). Most, stamped mark: CLIFTON DECOR (see fig. 32.5); all, painted decorator’s mark. Private collection, ex coll. Dr. Howard Silby. Cats. 307–14.
112
MARTIN
Bennett has been wrongly championed in ceramic literature as the pioneer majolica manufacturer in the United States, and yet, as this essay will show, the ware was but a small part of and late addition to his firm’s output.2 By contrast, Haynes’s company made a significant amount of the colorful lead-glazed ware and, in fact, was responsible for making Baltimore a leading center of American majolica production in the first half of the 1880s. Why, beginning with the establishment of Bennett’s pottery in the mid-1840s, did Baltimore become home to two prominent American ceramic manufacturers? Founded in 1729, Baltimore became a leading American city largely due to its location on the Chesapeake Bay, a major coastal estuary that fostered easy access to the Atlantic maritime trade with Europe, the Caribbean, and other American colonies. Commerce and manufacturing grew throughout the nineteenth century, as the city’s reach expanded with the opening in 1830 of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O). The earliest commercial rail network in the United States, the B&O eventually connected Baltimore to the middle South and Midwest. The city and the surrounding regions contained important deposits of clay, flint, and other raw materials, and had relatively easy access to coal—the resources necessary for the
113