Be There or Be Square

 

QUESTIONS: I really like the look of Mid-Century Modern design. I’ve started to gather furniture and accessories to decorate my apartment. I’ve been looking for a distinctive set of dishes to use in my kitchen. Can you recommend any?

ANSWERS: Yes, I can. While not many people are familiar with this, I recommend dinnerware from the Blair Ceramics of Ozark, Missouri. While often similar in price to its modern day counterpart, the 1950s dinnerware is superior in that it is often hand-painted and decorated. No two pieces are exactly alike 

Originally from Mount Vernon, Ohio, William Blair graduated from the Cleveland School of Art, after which he studied art and traveled throughout Europe. After returning to Ohio, he painted children’s portraits for a year before he apprenticed in ceramics for a pottery in Mount Vernon. His sister, Dorothy, and her husband, Bernard Purinton, opened the Purinton Pottery Company in 1936. Blair went to work for them painting decorations on their pieces. In 1941, Bernard and Dorothy moved their pottery to Shippenville, Pennsylvania.

Blair directed his artistic talent toward the production of pottery and was instrumental in the design of Purinton's characteristic handpainted wares. While there, Blair designed several of the most recognizable patterns including Apple which was the most popular while the factory was in operation. He also created the off-round shapes of the dinnerware lines with the Heather Plaid and Normandy Plaid motifs.

Blair believed that the design of American dinnerware needed to be overhauled. So he left Purinton and sought the help of his nephew Bart Higgins, who blueprinted molds while Blair worked on the designs. When they were ready, they traveled to the Springfield area and began searching for a building to convert to a factory. In Ozark, they found the old Fray Johnson Ford auto agency building, located just north of the Ozark square,  which was just the right size. For a year, they worked to convert it into a ceramic factory. They bought a $15,000 kiln from West Virginia and installed it into their factory. By 1946, they were hiring local workers and training them  to work in mixing, molding, glazing, painting, and kiln rooms. Each piece had to be painted by hand. 

By 1949, the company employed 32 workers, who produced as many as 3,600 pieces per week during peak production times. The firm shipped dinnerware to all 48 states, Hawaii, Cuba and Canada, to be sold by such retail outlets as Neiman Marcus and Marshall Field's department stores.

Blair Ceramics produced several lines of dinnerware, most with innovative square-shaped plates and platters. Blair frequently voiced objections to round plates and dinnerware while employed  by the Purinton Pottery. At his own company, Blair had the opportunity to produce what he considered more pleasing and appropriately shaped dinnerware. These distinctive pieces are also characterized by unique twisted handles and leaf-shaped knobs on the lids of serving pieces.

Blair had all his pieces hand-painted and marked most of them with an underglaze backstamp "Blair decorated by hand" The firm’s most popular pattern was Gay Plaid which it distributed and made continuously during its operation. This design featured horizontal forest green stripes and chartreuse and brown vertical stripes. Also produced were Rick-Rack with yellow stripes and brown zigzag bands; Yellow Plaid, similar to Gay Plaid except the predominant color is yellow; Bamboo, an ornately decorated design with multicolored leaves and bamboo in brown; and Autumn Leaf, consisting of a three deaf pattern in several shades.

The era of Blair Pottery came to and end in the Mid-50’s when lightening struck the factory building in Ozark and the resulting fire burned it to the ground. Bill Blair, who had overseen the operation each day, was weary of being tied to the business, and chose not to rebuild.

Prices for Blair dinnerware are still reasonable. For example. a coffee server sells for approximately $45; a five-piece place setting, $35; a creamer and sugar or 14-inch platter, $20; a stick-handled gravy bowl, $18; and ice-lip jug, $25. Prices for most patterns are approximately the same for comparable pieces.

While dinnerware produced in the 1940s-1950s was out of favor with the public for many years, recently it has been rediscovered by savvy collectors who see a certain charm in the quirky designs. 

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about the "Antiques of Christmas" in the 2021 Holiday Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

Christmas Way Back When

 

QUESTION: Visiting historic sites around the holidays reveals a wealth of beautiful decorations and old-fashioned charm. But just how charming were those old-fashioned Christmas celebrations? What did people do before Hallmark Christmas movies?

ANSWER: While what you read and see on T.V. about how the Victorians celebrated Christmas is often exaggerated, many of the holiday traditions we still practice today began back then thanks to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. But one of the greatest influences on modern Christmas traditions was none other than Charles Dickens.

While he wasn’t the first writer to write about Christmas, and certainly not the last, he, nevertheless, brought a myriad of already popular traditions together in his novella A Christmas Carol.  

With luck,  there was snow. Twinkling, sparkling, clean, white, heart-warming old-fashioned snow. Nothing reminds everyone of an old-fashioned Christmas like snow—Dickens’ Christmas Carol had plenty of it, for this was the essence of a Victorian Christmas.

During the Victorian era from 1837 to 1901, people celebrated Christmas with special family gatherings, feasting, embellishing the home with decorations, and gift giving in increasing abundance. Victorians loved to decorate for the holidays. A giant fir tree, adorned with dried hydrangeas in shades of rose and pale green, lacy fans, white silk roses—a symbol of the Virgin Mary—German glass balls, and delicate handmade paper ornaments, held  together with lace garland, woven with ribbon and strung fresh cranberries, stood in the parlor. Many people believe that the Christmas tree evolved from the Paradise tree, a fir hung with red apples and wafers, representing the host, which represented the Garden of Eden in a medieval miracle play about Adam and Eve performed on December 24.

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol during a period when the British were exploring and re-evaluating past Christmas traditions, including carols, and newer customs such as Christmas cards and Christmas trees. Both Dickens’ experiences of his youth and writings on Christmas by other authors, including Washington Irving, influenced A Christmas Carol. Dickens had written three Christmas stories prior to the novella, and was inspired following a visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several establishments for London's street children. The treatment of the poor and the ability of a selfish man to redeem himself by transforming into a more sympathetic character are the key themes of the story.

Arrangements of fresh greens and holly, a pagan custom adapted by Christians, decorated Victorian homes. The color green came to symbolize the Christian belief in eternal life through Christ. Legend says that Jesus' crown of thorns was plaited from holly. It's said that, before the crucifixion, the berries of the holly were white, but afterward, they turned crimson, like drops of blood.

Greens hung from chandeliers. Pine roping, wrapped with  pearls and pink moire taffeta bows, draped the grand staircase.  Perhaps a small wooden tree covered with prisms stood on a marble-top  table. Another, covered in intricate origami birds, might have stood on a hall table. The crowning touch was a large welcoming wreath that hung on the vestibule door flanked by alabaster urns filled with gold tinged twisted willow and red poinsettias. But the most important part of the Victorian celebration was the family's creche, which featured carved figures of Mary, Joseph and the Christ Child set in a miniature village, complete with meadows, fences, windmills and ponds. flanked by poinsettias. Many believe St. Francis of Assisi created the first creche using live animals in 1223.

Gift giving played an important role in Victorian celebrations. The lady of the house would smile as she peeled back the tissue covering a heavily embossed sterling silver dresser set or opened a box in which a pair of gold and amethyst earrings nestled. On the more practical side, she might have received a steel chatelaine, a chain which clipped to the waist and held keys, a pencil, and a button hook. For a special evening out, she might have been given  a dress cape of black silk velvet trimmed with jet beads and ostrich feathers.

All of the above was fine and dandy for wealthy Victorians, but for the majority of people who worked long hours for subsistence wages—not unlike Bob Cratchet in Dickens’ beloved story—life was a daily drudgery and Christmas, for many, was just another day of the year, albeit one they had off.    

A Christmas Carol captured the essence of the mid-Victorian revival of the Christmas holiday. Dickens had acknowledged the influence of the modern Western observance of Christmas and later inspired several aspects of Christmas, including family gatherings, seasonal food and drink, dancing, games and a festive generosity of spirit.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about the "Antiques of Christmas" in the 2021 Holiday Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

There’s Nothing So Liked by a Small Boy Than a Toy Truck

 

QUESTION: As a kid, I loved playing with three little cast-iron trucks. It’s only recently that I learned that they may have been made by the Kenton Toy Company when I saw one of the trucks I had at a small antique show at the local volunteer fire company. The dealer said she believed that the truck had been made by Kenton. Can you tell me anything about Kenton’s cast-iron toys?

ANSWER: At the turn of the 20th century, the Kenton Hardware Company promoted itself as "the largest factory in the USA exclusively making cast iron toys." The factory produced a variety of toys that were miniature versions of fire engines, circus wagons, carriages, banks, trains, and stoves. From the 1890's to the 1950's, the town of Kenton, Ohio, was a center of American cast-iron production.

F. M. Perkins founded the Kenton Lock Manufacturing Company in Kenton, Ohio, in 1890. The firm first produced high-quality, elaborate bronze and brass locks, and coat hooks. 

Perkins didn’t begin manufacturing toys until 1894 when a series of patent disputes caused Perkins to change the name of his company from the Kenton Lock Manufacturing Company to the Kenton Hardware Manufacturing Company. Kenton’s line consisted of banks, horse-drawn vehicles, and stoves. The production of the Columbia Bank, a souvenir of the World's Columbian Exposition, which provided a successful launch into the U.S. toy market.

What followed was a wide range of toy vehicles—hansom cabs, sulkies, surreys, chariots, fire-patrol carts, sedans, racing cars, buses, blimps, air-planes, milk wagons, bakery wagons, bandwagons, dump trucks, lumber trucks and circus trucks. Also, mechanical and regular banks in the forms of teddy bears and polar bears, the Statue of Liberty, the Flatiron building, radios and other playthings such as cap pistols, ranges and miniature sadirons.

Kenton constructed its toys from several parts, each of workers cast in a mold into which they poured the hot, liquid iron. After a short cooling period, they opened the  mold and removed the part. They then assembled the separate parts with rivets or bolts. Because of their rough surfaces, cast-iron toys couldn’t be lithographed like tin ones. Workers then hand painted or dipped the toys in two or three bright colors.  

Kenton became part of the National Novelty Corporation combine in 1903. It marketed its toys under the Wing Manufacturing brand. Fending off a series of takeover attempts, the toy division survived as a separate unit within Kenton Hardware Company. It continued to manufacture cast iron toys from 1920 to 1935.

Like most other businesses, the Kenton Hardware Company suffered during the Great Depression, so much so that it was in danger of going bankrupt. Then, just as Shirley Temple saved the Ideal Toy Company and Mickey Mouse did the same for Lionel trains and Ingersol watches, another popular icon came to the rescue of Kenton. Gene Autry saved the day with the Gene Autry toy pistol.

Vice president William Bixler persuaded the company to manufacture a copy of Gene Autry’s pearl handled six-shooter. Autry sent one of his guns to Ohio to assist in the creation of a child’s size model. Joe Solomon made the master mold in 1938. By 1939, over two million Gene Autry Repeating Cap Pistols had been sold.

Introduced in December 1937, it became a huge success in both the U.S. and then the world. One million were sold from February to August of 1938 alone, keeping the factory going night and day.

The peak of cast-iron toy production extended from shortly before the turn of the 20th century until the 1940's, when lighter-weight models that were less expensive to produce and transport superseded them. Kenton ceased production of horse-drawn toys in the early 1920's, except for a beer wagon made in the 1930's, but in 1939 the firm introduced a completely new line of horse-drawn toys, which continued through the early 1950's.

Most of these toys, except for the early banks and stoves, weren’t marked. Company catalogs, the first of which appeared in 1892, can help with identification. Prices for authentic early pieces in good condition can sell for four figures for some horse-drawn Victorian carriages and fire vehicles.

Kenton ceased operations in 1952. 

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about the "Antiques of Christmas" in the 2021 Holiday Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

Keepsakes, Not Throwaways

 

QUESTION: Sometime ago I purchased a box of colorful decorative holiday cutouts and imprints. Many of the designs feature St. Nicholas and have a definite British Victorian look to them. What were these called and what were they used for?

ANSWER: Believe it or not, the cutouts you purchased are known as scraps. While the word “scraps” has now come to mean parts that are left over, such as scraps of wood, fabric, and paper, back in the 19th century it meant something quite different.

The Victorians loved decoration—the more the better. They also were very romantic and loved sentimentality and keepsakes. This led to a phenomenon popularly known as scraps. 

Also called die cuts or chromos, scraps were small, colorful, embossed paper images that were sold in sheets by stationers and booksellers and used in various decorative, entertainment, and educational applications. Their diverse subject matter included flowers, trees, fruits, birds, animals, pets, ladies and gents, children, historical people and events, angels, transportation themes, and occupational motifs. 

People pasted them into albums and used them to make greeting cards and decorated boxes. They also pasted them on folding screens and pieces of furniture. Scraps served as extra learning materials to teach young children the alphabet, counting, natural history, and geography, as well as teaching tools for learning prayers and Bible stories and in the enjoyment of nursery rhymes and fairy tales.

The first scraps originated in German bakers' shops as decoration for biscuits and cakes and for fastening on wrapped sweets. The earliest ones were printed in uncut sheets in black and white, then hand colored. Scraps appeared in Britain in the 1850s and soon became popular as decorative additions to Christmas cards. They were also used to illustrate historical as well as events of the time.

By the mid-1800's, chromolithography had been invented. This made a wide variety of  colored scraps available to an ever-increasing market. But chromolithography required a lengthy process. Each color had to be applied separately and needed to dry before the next color could be applied. However, the process made up to 20 printed colors possible. Printers made Victorian and Edwardian scraps in sheets that contained small chromolithographs designed to be cut out in the same manner as the first penny postage stamps. After printing and before embossing, they coated the sheets with a gelatin and gum layer that resulted in a glossy appearance and helped the paper stretch without cracking the print. Steel cutters, powered by foot treadles, punched out excess paper and left clean, sharp edges. Thin paper sheets, imprinted with manufacturers’ trademarks and called "ladders," held the cut sheets together.

The elaborate use of stamping can often be seen in uncut scrap sheets. Optimum use of space, required minimal cutting and lead to the intricate and ingenious design of the cutting die. 

Early in the 20th century, young ladies and children of the middle and upper classes began keeping scrapbooks that contained collections of commercially produced scraps. They organized them thematically with a single subject for the entire book or with several themes arranged by section. Sometimes, they added lines of poetry, personal notations, inscriptions by family and friends, and drawings. 

Stationery stores sold scrapbooks with tooled leather covers, elaborately embossed bindings, engraved clasps, and brass locks. Some scrapbooks contained printed decorations on their pages, as well as centered oval, circular or square sections into which people could paste items. Other albums held printed pages with theme-setting embossed decoration-like flowers or birds. Many scraps keepers made their own albums by pasting scraps over catalog and magazine pages.

Scraps production continued through the 1920's, but changes in popular taste, the effects of World War I, and the economic limitations of the Great Depression all contributed to their decline. Over time, newspaper and magazine pictures supplanted scraps as the "cutouts" of choice. 

Today, sheets of uncut Victorian scraps and single scraps of good design, color, and condition are prized by ephemera collectors. Die cuts by celebrated manufacturers like Raphael Tuck and Sons, which produced a series of scraps to commemorate Queen Victoria's 50th jubilee in 1887, are especially prized by collectors. Values vary from $5 for common scraps up to $50 for unusual and sought-after images. 

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about the "Antiques of Christmas" in the 2021 Holiday Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

Toast Anyone?

 

QUESTION: While browsing at a recent Fall antique fair, I noticed an unusual object on one of the tables. It looked like an A-frame built of shiny steel and had an electric cord coming out of one end. The dealer said it was an early electric toaster. It seemed a bit dangerous looking to me and not at all sleek like the modern toasters of today. What can you tell me about this old toaster? When was the toaster invented?

ANSWER: Indeed, those early toasters were mighty strange looking but to the people in the early 20th century, they were a godsend. No longer did they have to hold a slice of bread over an open flame or hot stovetop to toast it. Humans had been eating bread for over 6,000 years and toasting it over a fire for just as long. 

But with the arrival of wood and coal stoves in the 1880’s, people needed a new toasting method. The very first toaster was an odd looking gadget, consisting of a tin plate to which was attached four triangular wire stands. The user placed a slice of bread within each of the wire stands, forming a pyramid of sorts. Then the user placed the device on a hot stove. The bread browned on one side at a time, making it necessary for the user to turn the toast before it burned.

Fire was the source of heat for toasting bread but the advent of electricity led engineer Albert Marsh to create a nickel and chromium composite called Nichrome in 1905. Toaster makers could easily shape this substance into wires or strips, plus it was low in electrical conductivity. Within months, other inventors were using Nichrome to produce electric toasters.

Original electric toasters consisted of a heating element and a stationary wire frame to hold the toast in place. Most were mounted on a porcelain base and posed a burn hazard to those charged with making breakfast. Toaster manufacturers in the 1920s added a protective case and a variety of clever mechanisms to automatically turn the bread for easy toasting on both sides.

There were five different toaster styles—the Turnover, the Flopper, the Swinger, the Sweetheart, and the Pop Up.

Popular from the mid-1920s until the early 1930s, the Turnover featured a spring-loaded door on either side that hinged down. Each door held a slice of bread. When one side of the bread was toasted, the operator opened each door to let the partially toasted bread drop down, giving the non-toasted side access to the heating element when the door was shut again. People places this toaster right on the breakfast due to its manual operation. The diligent person in charge of toast had to make sure to turn the toast before it burned.

Each manufacturer attempted to create a slightly new design that did something the others could not. From this crazed period of innovation came designs and mechanisms like the Flopper. The Flopper featured metal doors with a fancy pierced design that also hinged on the bottom which formed an “A” when closed. When the toast was done, the operator opened the side doors, and the toast “flopped” out.

Swingers featured a swinging basket with a two-sided metal wire enclosure that held the bread slices. Users turned a knob to flip the slice of bread to the other side. It also branded the toast with a distinctive pattern, making it more attractive for the breakfast table. The first four-slice toaster was a swinger. It was so expensive that manufacturers offered convenient payment plans so consumers could afford it.

The Sweetheart worked by pressing two buttons located on the base of the toaster. The buttons controlled each side of the toaster. Depressing the buttons would swing the baskets on each side of the toaster out at a 90-degree angle, so the user could either place the bread in or remove the toast. Releasing the button allowed the basket to swing back into place against the unit. Each additional push of the buttons rotated the bread slices in the opposite direction to toast both sides.

In 1919, Minneapolis resident Charles P. Strite was working at the Waters-Genter Company plant in Stillwater. The factory’s cafeteria often served burnt toast. This inspired him to create a toaster that would toast bread automatically with minimal human intervention. He called his device the Toastmaster, for which he received a patent in 1921. The Toastmaster had heating elements that could toast both sides of a slice of bread at the same time. The device also had a timer that would turn off the heat and a spring that would eject the toast, eliminating the chance of burning. Strite’s invention found its way into restaurants immediately. By 1926, he introduced a home version with a variable timer that allowed the user to adjust the desired lightness or darkness of their toast.

Prior to 1926, manufacturers originally marketed and sold pop-up or automatic toasters  to restaurants. They were a luxury for most families; so most manufacturers continued selling manual toasters for home well into the 1950s. 

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about the Sears Catalogue and the items sold in it in "Sears' Book of Bargains" in the 2021 Fall Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.