Beauty Before Comfort: A Memoir

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 diminish the potteries’ magnetism. Men from Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and even Tennessee continued to come, lean and grasping, riding the rails or hiking the banks of the Ohio River. They were coming to a place thick with fable. A place they’d heard about, like California.

Soon, mass production had replaced fine craftsmanship, and the newer, more efficient potteries subsumed the antiquated boutique potteries, which relied exclusively on manual labor. Crockery City was crowded. Across the river, Newell and Chester were becoming the brave new pottery worlds. Unlike East Liverpool, which had grown to its limits between the twin barriers of hillside and river, Chester and Newell offered fresh possibilities. They had the same clay. And in West Virginia, the hill slopes were largely empty, the riverbank land primed for habitation.

What was needed was a bridge. In 1897, the first bridge to connect East Liverpool with Chester was built. Streetcars ran over it, carrying developers to West Virginia and potters to Crockery City. In 1900, Taylor, Smith and Taylor opened a pottery in Chester. The Edwin Knowles and Harker Pottery Companies would follow them.

Not to be outdone, the Homer Laughlin China Company began construction on the Newell Bridge on June 2, 1904. It would cost $250,000, and was erected just a quarter of a mile from the Chester Bridge. It opened a year later, on July 4, with a celebratory first crossing. HLC bought acres of land in Newell. They also bought a pottery site large enough to house a thirty-six-kiln factory, what would be the largest pottery built to date.

Other potteries saw HLC as foolish; it was hubris to build so large a factory on the whiff of a promise. Barely anyone lived in Newell. Certainly not enough people to staff a thirty-six-kiln factory. But it was HLC that prospered, while its competitors, hobbled by inadequate factory designs and outdated equipment, began shutting down their kilns. The bridge and HLC’s promise of steady work brought intense expansion to Newell and Chester. In 1906, only a few houses stood in Newell. By 1907, there were more than 130. HLC not only constructed the bridge and the plants but laid down streets, erected more houses, and created ball fields. HLC either built or bought everything in Newell, down to the streetcars, the waterworks, and the schools. In 1917, the company even produced a car, the Homer Laughlin, a stretch convertible sports car with stitched leather seats and gleaming running boards.

The Blairs settled in Hancock County the same year. Andrew became a potter as soon as he could and quickly rose through the factory ranks to become a decorator, the most sought-after position in the factories. Decorators, also known as hand painters and liners, didn’t have to hoist crates or sweat over kilns, and they were the most highly paid clay shop workers. Andrew spent his days trimming plates, cups, bowls, platters, goblets, and gravy boats with liquid gold. He’d take a tiny brush, no thicker than a rose thorn, and hand-line the edges, one after another, precisely and neatly, allowing no margin for error. Liners had prestige, and a staff of decal girls, women who would add flowers and garlands to the plates and cups before firing.

The decorator’s kiln was the smallest. It measured only six feet high and burned at a lower temperature, just hot enough to set the colors and decals, but not so hot that it cracked the glaze. Different colors required different temperatures, so pottery was loaded on shelves and separated by ceramic stilts. After firing, the ware would cool and kiln-men would draw the pieces out, now baked to a brilliant shine.

Andrew recognized his good fortune and worked tirelessly to preserve it, often logging double shifts for weeks at a time, never stopping even to read the newspaper. While he may have settled for a common wife, Andrew Blair refused to succumb to the conspiracy of circumstance that had brought them together. He pined for culture. He taught himself how to play the ukulele and the mandolin. Then he taught others, for a price. He shied away from what he saw as low-rent habits, such as gambling and public affection. He did spit tobacco, but only in private and into a tureen he’d painted with deer and hunters in jaunty red caps.

He was not one of those other people, the men who soaked their shirts through with sweat and had clay packed under their fingernails even on Sundays—sour-smelling men in ill-fitting pants, spitting as they laughed. Andrew knew he was different. He never wore anything that didn’t fit, never left the house looking less than altogether dandy, his trousers cutting a sharp line down his thigh, his coats free of pottery dust. When he trimmed his prize peonies, he donned a tie. He walked ramrod-straight, and he valued vertical posture in others. It bothered him to no end that his wife was stooped, burdened by her diabetes and her immense weight. Lazy, he thought.

When he wasn’t at the pottery, he was in his backyard studio, making china dogs with gold eyelashes or bunnies with silver bows to sell on his own. Blairware, he called it. He had a hand-cranked wheel, a circle of marble that sat on top of a cast-iron stand. It was on this wheel that he spun plates painted with gurgling babies, ballerinas with lace skirts, and mewing kitty cats, their claws tipped with purple dye. He stamped “A. C. Blair” in liquid gold on the bottom of each frilly little plate and china novelty.

In time, he created other lines. Although Andrew Blair was not a member of the Ku Klux Klan, he liked their business, so he founded the A. C. Blair Klan Plate Company by snatching up blank plates from Harker and HLC and painting them with Klan motifs. The best-selling items were the platters that were painted red and yellow, with a fiery cross in the center, and those with a masked Klansman on horseback, the cross ablaze in the background. They are collector’s items now, these plates. Prized by the same type of men who covet Nazi helmets and Civil War medical kits.

Hancock County was a hotbed for the KKK, especially during my grandmother’s youth, when they focused their rage on the east end of the panhandle, where many of the area’s black and Italian potters lived. The Klansmen operated under the dubious motive of enforcing blue laws, and they broke into homes, ostensibly searching for liquor. They also marched through the potteries, hooded and draped in white, demanding that the bosses fire any Italian workers. The police did little to stop them, as those who weren’t intimidated by the Klan were generally members.

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