What Goes Around Comes Around

 

QUESTION: For the last couple of years, I’ve been buying vintage kitchen utensils. At first, I had planned to use them to decorate my Mid-Century Modern kitchen, but I got hooked on them and now purchase them not only at flea markets but online. Some I recognize, others I don’t. What types of gadgets did women use in their kitchen? And are these old utensils worth collecting?

ANSWER: Kitchen gadgets are a popular collectible. And what’s interesting about them is that most are still usable in today’s kitchen. Even with all the electric and electronic devices available today, there are just some things that need to be done by hand, preferably with some sort of gadget. The proliferation of gadgets advertised on T.V., the Internet, and social media attests to this.

There are dozens of quirky looking utensils—graters, slicers, ice cream scoops, ice picks, juicers, peelers, sharpeners, mashers, ricers, strainers, sifters, scoops, scales, and ladles. The list is almost endless.

All these utensils—from food mincers, pitters, and corers to spiral whisks and jar lifters—eased even the most basic of a housewife's culinary chores. Ingenious kitchen gadgets made exacting tasks—such as defining the outer edges of a pie crust with a pie crimper—a pleasure. Colored handles added to their attraction.

During the late 19th century, the modernization of the American kitchen had begun. The kitchen was a place where families gathered informally to cook and bake, make butter, can and preserve fruits and vegetables, peel potatoes, dry herbs, and wash dishes. And it took a variety of utensils to complete these jobs.

From the 1920's through the 1940's, large and small companies manufactured  hundreds of these gadgets, trying to help make kitchen work easier and more colorful. Brightly painted cooking utensils of the 1920s brought the first dab of color into American kitchens. Apple green led the cutlery color wheel, followed by Mandarin red. 

What could be better than homemade pie with homemade crust? Most pie crimpers had wooden handles and resembled small versions of today's pizza cutters Whalers often carved them of whale ivory for their wives and sweethearts back home. By the 20th century, makers introduced metal with the wood. Of course, there were many other baking gadgets like dough blenders, pie lifters, rolling pins, and spatulas. 

Before food processors and electric beaters, there were efficient hand and mechanical beaters. Among these were a variety of wooden handled spiral whisks, flat wire whips, and, of course, those very efficient rotary beaters. The forerunner to the food processor was the glass pitcher beater which came in variety of shapes and sizes.

Old choppers and mincers had wooden handles and stainless steel curved blades. Many of the old ones, made of glass, wood, or steel, were more durable. Some glass jar choppers and mincers had handles to turn, making the work easier and faster. Of course, cooks also used grinders mounted to the corner of the kitchen table. Simply by putting almost anything into the wide opening at the top and turning the handle, they could grind meat, nuts, and berries.

Department stores such as Abraham & Straus, Macy's,, and Wanamaker's led the market selling colorful vintage utensils and other kitchen paraphernalia. 

Many small businesses produced these labor-saving utensils. One of the most notable was A & J Manufacturing Company of Binghamton, New York. Colored utensils from A & J can be found at flea markets and antique shops and shows simply because these products proliferated nationally and internationally in the kitchen-cutlery market for nearly 40 years.

A & J began humbly in 1909 in the homes of Benjamin T. Ash and Edward H. Johnson, who lived in rural upstate New York. After creating and marketing their first product—a one-handed eggbeater—they added numerous other kitchen gadgets with natural wooden handles to their product line. By 1918, A & J had moved to a commercial building and employed 200 workers who cranked out some four million tools annually.

The company was the first to offer knives, spatulas, ladles, and other items in one package. 

These early 20th-century kitchen gadgets have a strong relationship to today’s “As-seen-on-TV”  gadgets, advertised on many of the retro channels. Take the one-hand blender. Except for its streamlined shape and lack of a colored handle, it’s very similar to Ash’s and West’s one-handed eggbeater. It puts a new spin on the old saying, “What goes around comes around.”

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 Age of Photography" in the 2023 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.

What Exactly is a Pier Table?

 

QUESTION: I like to visit historic houses. Invariably, the first stop is by a narrow table in the main hall. Next to it usually stands a hall tree. The docent usually begins by telling us that the women of the house would stand in front of this narrow table and adjust their petticoats using the mirror placed behind it. This seems like a plausible explanation. When and how did this practice begin? And why is the table called a “pier” table? According to the dictionary, a pier is a structure leading from the shore out to sea, used as a boat landing or for entertainment. 

ANSWER: The English language can be complicated. There are many words that sound the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings. Over time, the word “peer,” meaning to look through a window with difficulty, may have been confused with the word “pier,” a seaside structure used for landing boats or for entertainment. Since most people coming to the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries spoke a different language—even British English was different than American English—it’s only natural that along the way, the two words got confused. It’s also likely that because a pier table juts out from the wall that it resembled a pier jutting out from the shore.

Docents in historic houses always seem to have interesting stories about the furniture in them. One of these concerns the pier table. Supposedly, Southern women would stop in front of it and check the mirror below it to see if their petticoats were showing before going out. However, there are two things wrong with this story. First, the table did not appear primarily in the South, and second, women of the 19th century did no such thing. A woman of the time wouldn’t have been caught dead adjusting her undergarments in a public area of her house.  Besides that, the architecture of the table, with the top projecting forward, well out over the mirror, prevents anyone, male or female from actually seeing beyond  the area of their feet.

So what exactly is a pier table? Simply, it’s a low, usually narrow table that stands in the pier, or wall section between two windows, often in the parlor of a wealthier person’s house. Cabinetmakers often made them in pairs of expensive woods, such as mahogany, rosewood, and giltwood. Unfortunately, ill informed curators of historic homes—originally wealthy women who joined groups who raised money to restore and manage historic homes—had heard the story of the pier table and placed it in the main hall where it didn’t belong in the first place. 

The pier table first appeared in continental Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and became popular in England in the last quarter of the 17th century. The first known use of such a table in America was in 1765 and remained popular until the mid 19th century.

During the Regency Period from 1800 to 1830, a pier table had a mirror mounted between its back legs against the wall, or sometimes above it. The purpose of the mirror was to reflect the light around the room, not to check petticoats. The mirrors were often slightly angled towards the ceiling in order to catch as much light as possible, thus precipitating the fictional account. The extensive use of concave looking glasses in the 18th century and mirrors in the 19th century bounced the dim light from oil lamps around the room, increasing overall brightness. The mirror also reflected the pattern in the tile or carpet and helped make the room feel larger.

Eventually, pier tables became symbols of wealth. Reflecting light around a room on highly-polished surfaces, including mirrors, glass, crystal pendants on chandeliers, or fine wood surfaces, was a way of demonstrating wealth. It dazzled the eye and demonstrated a great deal of labor from servants who maintained that high degree of cleanliness.

At the beginning of the 19th century, cabinetmakers around Philadelphia usually produced pier tables in the Chippendale style. They used Chippendale’s English design and traditional construction techniques since most had been trained by English cabinetmakers. The table became an American staple in larger homes during the Federal Period in the early 19th century, primarily in the Northern states, not in the South. 

The most commonly seen example of the table is in the Classical style of the early 1800s, usually with a marble top and columns of some sort—often also marble—at each corner supporting the heavy top. But why a marble top on a hall table? These tables were almost always 30-inches high, the exact height of a dining room table. As such, they could be used in the dining room as an extra serving space without fear of damage from hot plates on the marble top.

The pier table reached it decorative zenith in the Empire period of the 1820s at the hands of such designers as Charles Honoré Lannuier, Thomas Hope and Joseph Meeks. The use of gilded caryatids—winged, female figures from Greek architecture—were frequently used as columns. Meeks used a set of lyres at each end to support the top.

One of the greatest designers of pier tables was French ébéniste Charles-Honoré Lannuier, who emigrated in 1803 and became one of the leading furniture makers in New York. Trained in Paris, he rose to fame during the American Federal Period. After the Revolutionary War and War of 1812, anti-English sentiment made French goods especially appealing to Americans. Lannuier imported French pattern books to keep abreast of the latest Napoleonic style. His work featured robustly carved and gilded caryatid supports, carved dolphin feet, and elaborate gilt-bronze ormolu mounts. And while not every wealthy person could afford a Lannuier pier table, his tables reached the height of design excellence in the first two decades of the 19th century.

After the Empire period, the Late Classicism style prevailed in the 1840s and 1850s with its large cyma curves, scrolled supports and undecorated expanses of crotch-cut mahogany veneer. This is the table that was frequently associated with the Southern plantation and the petticoat myth.

After the Civil War, the pier table came to be known as a console table, and that’s when it began appearing in the foyers and front hallways of houses of the wealthy. Generally speaking, console tables stood higher than their pier table counterparts. They also usually didn’t have mirrors behind them as lighting technology had greatly improved since the beginning of the 19th century. 

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 Age of Photography" in the 2023 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.

The Teapot King

 

Aladdin Teapot

QUESTION: My mother was an avid tea drinker. When she was a young woman, she began buying old teapots at flea markets and yard sales. When I grew up and left to go on my own, I started giving her a teapot for her birthday. Over time, she amassed a collection of some 50 teapots. She passed away recently, and her collection has passed on to me. I chose the teapots I bought for her because of their unusual shapes, but I noticed that a good many of them seem to be marked for the Hall China Company. I’d like to continue adding to this collection. Why would so many have been made by Hall China? And as collectibles, are these teapots of any value?

ANSWER: Indeed, the Hall China Company is the king of teapots. Lots of people probably have one and don’t know it.

Gold Decorated Los Angeles Teapot

Albany Teapot

Robert Hall founded the Hall China Company after the dissolution of East Liverpool Potteries of East Liverpool, Ohio, in 1903. Taggert Hall, Robert’s son, became president following his father’s unexpected death in 1904. The company initially made jugs, toilet sets, and utilitarian whiteware. Robert T. Hall’s major contribution to the firm’s growth was the development of an economical, single-fire process for lead-free glazed wares introduced in 1911.

Robert Hall died just a year after founding his company. One of his eight children, Robert Taggart Hall, took it over and immediately began developments to introduce the single-fire process, which had first been used centuries earlier by Chinese potters during the Ming Dynasty from 1368 to 1644. His aim was to change from the two-firing manufacturing method, using first a biscuit firing and then the glaze firing. With the help of staff chemists and ceramic engineers, Hall experimented from 1904 until 1911, when the process was successful. The new process fused together the white body, color and glaze when it was fired at a temperature of 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Pear Teapot

The new glazes allowed the creation of brilliant colors never before seen on American china: 47 colors developed for the new process, which allowed for rapid expansion of the company and its product selections at the onset of World War I. After tepid sales of its new housewares lines in the 1910s, the company tried designing and selling decorated teapots. The teapot business was so successful that the company decided to expand it from the original three designs to a plethora of new shapes and colors. In the 1940s the teapot business began to dwindle. By the 1960s, probably due to the increased preference for coffee by the public, teapot sales had fallen to insignificance.

In the mid-1920s, Hall China began producing a range of ware exclusively for the Jewel Tea Company. Jewel started using Hall teapots as premiums, and then expanded the promotion to include its own line of distinctive dinnerware and kitchenware.

Globe Teapot

Hall’s teapots were durable, non-porous, and unlike other types of china, didn’t craze.  The Hall palette of colors included no fewer than 47 different variations over the years.  The non-crazing process used to manufacture its pieces were made to emulate beautiful wares made in China during the Ming Dynasty, although the shapes and decor didn’t generally show any Asian influence. 

Hall also produced novelty teapots shaped like cars, footballs, and doughnuts that remain popular with collectors although they're often difficult to find today. These include the popular Nautilus and Aladdin teapots.

Nautilus Teapot

A Selection of Hall Teapots
Hall produced over 160 different shapes and color combinations of teapots. The first, the Gold Decorated Teapot line, also known as the Los Angeles teapot, was extremely popular.

Loc Angeles Teapot

The second, the Boston teapot, which also began production in 1916, came in two styles, the Boston Knob, included here, and the Boston Sunken Lid. Both came in seven sizes from one cup to seven or eight cup. The Boston is one of Hall China Company’s earliest and most enduring styles. In 1916, the McCormack Tea Company purchased the Boston in the seven cup green. The seven cup green and brown Boston teapots were the first ones carried by the Jewel Tea Company in 1924.

Boston Teapots

Philadelphia Teapot

Another teapot Hall introduced in 1916 was the New York teapot and was one of Hall’s longest running styles, available from 1916 through 1989. It was originally and continually produced in nine different sizes for the Hall hotel ware line but was also added to the Gold Decorated line in 1920.  

The Philadelphia  teapot, produced during the 1920s, came in seven different sizes, ten, seven, six, five, four, three and one and a half cups. Later in that same decade, Hall introduced the Hollywood teapot which came in four, five, six and eight cup sizes.

Tea-for-Two Teapots

From 1930 to 1996, Hall produced the Tea-for-Two, a combination teapot and a hot water pot, It’s distinguished from the Twin-Tea set by the sloped shape of the body, It can also be found as a Tea for Four set. 

Musical Teapot

From the late 1930s to the 1940s, Hall produced one of two Globe shaped teapots. The No-Drip is a Globe shape teapot with a different spout and decoration. The Globe teapot, introduced in the late 1930s, was usually found with the gold decoration pictured. By 1942 it was available in black, blue, brown, cadet, canary, delphinium, Dresden, emerald, green, green luster, ivory, marine, maroon, orchid, rose, turquoise and yellow. 

Hall’s Musical teapot, made in the 1930s, wasn’t a success. The music box, which played “Tea for Two,” sat under the teapot in a “well,” held in place with a spring clip. Often, users would wash the teapot without removing the musical box, causing damage to the mechanism. 

In 1937, Hall added the Streamline to the Gold Decorated teapot line. It featured the standard gold decoration around the top, edge, and spout found on other teapots in the line.

Streamline Teapot

Doughnut Teapot

The Automobile was one of the Hall China Company’s Novelty teapots introduced in 1938. Although it has a very unusual shape it was very popular. Introduced in 1938, the Basket was another Novelty teapot that included the Doughnut, the Birdcage, the Football, and the Basketball. In 1982, Hall was commissioned to make a caricature teapot of newly elected President Ronald Reagan. After a partial delivery the customer defaulted on the remaining order and subsequently the teapots were sold at the local Hall Closet store.  

Automobile Teapot

Rhythm Teapot

Hall China produced some of its most beautifully designed teapots in the 1930s, many of which featured Art Deco styling. Introduced in 1938 in the 8-cup size with the 6-cup introduced the following year, the Airflow was colored marine in its standard design. It was perfectly balanced and was as simple to lift as a purse, easy to pour, plus the lid wouldn’t fall off.

Hall introduced the Rhythm teapot in 1939. Originally introduced as a gold decorated teapot with gold dots on the upper two drapes, it was later a part of the Hall American line and came in over 100 different colors. That same year, Hall produced a special souvenir teapot for the 1939 New York World's Fair.

1939 New York World's Fair Teapot

Twinspout Teapot

Designer Oscar Ottoson invented the Twinspout teapot for which he received a patent in 1938. Hall China produced it for the Twinspout Pottery Company of New York.  When a user removed the lid, there were two openings, the larger for the tea and the smaller for the hot water. 

Produced from 1939 to 1963, the Aladdin teapot was one of Hall’s most popular shapes. It came with either a round or an oval opening, both with and without infusers, and in narrow and wide bodies.

Sani-Gold Teapot

During the 1940s, Hall came out with the Sani-Gold teapot. It first appeared in the 1941 Hall China Special Catalog #4. The firm made it in three and six cup sizes, with grid in the spout  to catch the tea leaves which was also shortened for easy cleaning.. The style, often referred to as “pert” was also easier to store. 

Introduced in 1940, the Hook Cover teapot, produced only in the six cup size, had a lid that wouldn’t fall off when pouring. The body has a hook over which the lid fits, thus the name.

Hook Cover Teapot

Windshield Teapot

The Windshield teapot, introduced in 1941, had a collar similar to the one worn by Queen Elizabeth I of England.

From the mid 1950s through the 1960s, Hall produced the Parade teapot as one of its Gold Decorated teapots.. It had a hook cover lid and a non-slip handle.

Hall produced the E-Style Cameo Rose teapot, designed by J. Palin Thorley, another of Hall’s top designers, exclusively for the Jewel Tea Company from the 1950s to the 1970s. Another of its noted designers was Donald Schreckengost who designed the Pear teapot, first introduced in 1970.

E-Style Cameo Rose Teapot

Airflow Teapot

Hall China produced so many teapots during its existence that it’s nearly impossible for a collector to collect them all. 

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 "Coffee--The Brew of Life" in the 2023 Summer 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.

What Do Mason Jars Have to Do with the Erie Canal?

 

QUESTION: I’ve been collecting old mason jars for a while. Recently, I found a blue one at a flea market. Embossed on the front of it are the words “The Clyde.” The letters “CGW” appear on the bottom. I haven’t been able to find any information about this jar. Can you help me?

ANSWER: It appears that you found an old Mason jar made by the Clyde Glass Works of Clyde, New York, in 1895.

When New York Governor DeWitt Clinton proposed the Erie Canal that would cross the state, linking the Hudson River with the Great Lakes, people sarcastically called it "Clinton’s Big Ditch." A construction project of that magnitude, completed entirely by hand labor, seemed impossible. But by July 4, 1817, construction of the canal had begun. It wasn’t until October 26, 1825 that a canal boat made the first full-length voyage on the new canal.

Frederick Augustus Dezeng, an immigrant from Saxony, Germany, who operated a window glass factory near Geneva, New York, was a good friend of Governor Clinton. He understood the importance of being able to transport goods by water from Lake Erie all the way to New York City via the Hudson River. But more importantly, he realized that shipping his glass by canal boat would be safer and cause less breakage. Even carefully packed, glass didn’t  travel well in horse-drawn carts over bumpy dirt roads of unpredictable condition.

 saw the potential of doing business via the Erie Canal. Access to firewood to fuel the glass furnaces was a major reason, as was the ease of packet boats bringing in sand from Oneida, New York, along with quantities of potash lime via the Canal. He encouraged his  youngest of five children, William, to set up a glassworks along the Canal in nearby Laurelville, which later changed its name to Clyde.

William S. Dezeng and his brother-in-law, James R. Rees, went into partnership to open a glass factory to make cylinder window glass in 1827. They laid the cornerstone for their new enterprise on March 27, 1828, and the factory began production that year. A newspaper advertisement from 1833 promoted the firm’s glass as  first quality and free from imperfections. This was a major achievement in itself since up to that time window glass had many imperfections. In the process, a glassblower blew molten glass into a cylinder, then cut it it open and annealed it to flatten it out. However, ripples and small bubbles in the finished glass were almost unavoidable.

Orrin Southwick and Almon Wood, calling their glass business Southwick & Wood, built the first bottle factory in Clyde in 1864. Wood apparently withdrew to be replaced by Charles W. Reed to form the firm of Southwick & Reed—sometime between 1864 and 1868.

About 1868, Southwick, Reed & Company merged the bottle and window glass plants into a single unit. Unfortunately, the factory burned on July 24, 1873, but they rebuilt it  immediately.

Sometime during the following year, Clyde gained a license from the Consolidated Fruit Jar Company to produce Mason Patent jars. Since there were many fruit jars bearing the “CFJCo” monogram, their jars had “CLYDE, N.Y.” embossed on either the front or the back of each jar. When Consolidated apparently sold its fruit-jar interests to Hero around 1882, Clyde lost a major portion of its business.

In 1880, the owners of Southwick, Reed & Company incorporated as the Clyde Glass Works. By this time, Clyde was making soda and beer bottles, liquor flasks, and fruit jars, commonly referred to as Mason jars, marked with one of the Clyde logos. They produced quart jars in amber, aqua, cobalt blue, and clear glass but only made pint size jars in aqua.

Between 1868 and 1895, the Clyde Glass Works produced five different Mason jars—The Clyde, written in cursive, the CLYDE LIGHTNING and the CLYDE MASON’S IMPROVED, both embossed in all uppercase letters and made for the Consolidated Fruit Jar Company.

The Mason jar first appeared in the 1850s when John Landis Mason, a tinsmith from Vineland, New Jersey, was searching for a way to improve the relatively new process of home canning. Until then, home canning involved using wax to create an airtight seal above food. Users stopped the jars with corks, sealed them with wax, then boiled them. It was messy process and hardly foolproof.

In 1857, a 26-year-old Mason invented and patented threaded screw-top jars. The earliest Mason jars were made from transparent aqua glass. But Mason didn’t patent the rest of his invention—the rubber ring on the underside of the flat metal lids that created the airtight seal, which made wax unnecessary. By 1868, many glass companies were producing Mason jars. Including Southwick, Reed and Company. Though Mason tried to regain control of his invention after various court cases and failed business partnerships, he gave up.

Clyde Glass Works produced a clear Mason jar embossed with “The Clyde” in upwardly slanted cursive letters from 1895 to 1915. It was handmade with an old-style Lightning closure. Those jars with ground lips had narrow mouths while those with smooth lips had a regular size mouth. 

The firm first made these jars in 1895 to commemorate its incorporation as the Clyde Glass Works. By 1903, it had purchased new machines for making fruit jars but only used them to make jars until sometime during the following year. 

A jar, embossed with “CLYDE / LIGHTNING” on the side was a blown jar of green glass with a ground rim and sealed with an old-style Lightning closure. The "Lightning" toggle or swing-type closure had widespread use on a lot of different bottle types, though its primary use was on bottles for carbonated beverages, such as soda and beer, and canning jars. However, the sealing surface for these two main types of Lightning-type closures was different. Charles de Quillfeldt of New York City invented and patented this type of bottle or jar closure on January 5, 1875.  He originally intended his design to be used on beverage bottles but later altered it to use on canning or Mason jars.

Variations of the Mason jar include the "Improved Mason" which sealed on a shoulder above the thread instead of below. The Clyde Glass Works produced the Clyde Mason’s Improved jar by hand and embossed “CLYDE,” “IMPROVED,” “MASON” in three separate lines.

Out of 59 bottles identified as being made by Clyde, fifty-one were in the arched format—the arch and inverted arch. 

The glass works at Clyde, New York, had a long and varied history. Although it’s almost certain that Clyde never marked the majority of its containers, certain types of both bottles and jars were clearly identified as being produced at the plant. The earliest of these were jars, the Mason’s Improved jars with “S&W” and “SW&Co” embossed on the bottom edge came from the Southwick & Reed and Southwick, Reed & Company factories, respectively. These were almost certainly the earliest marked jars, made from 1864 to 1870. 

From 1870 to 1882, the factory made the Mason’s Patent and Mason’s Improved jars, embossed with the CFJCo monogram on the front and “CLYDE, N.Y.” on the reverse. Jars made between 1882 and 1890 didn’t have Clyde logos on them. The plant made The Clyde from 1890 to 1910, and produced the Clyde Mason’s Improved jar from 1895 to 1915. Lackluster sales forced the Clyde Glass Works to close in 1915.

The age, rarity, color, and condition of an antique Mason jar greatly influence its value.  A jar's age and rarity can be determined by the color, shape, mold and production marks of the glass, and the jar's closure. Mason jars usually have a proprietary brand embossed on the jar. Early jars embossed with "Mason's Patent November 28th 1858" that date from the late 1850s to early 1860s closely match the illustrations of Mason's 1858 patents. While the Clyde Glass Works’ Mason jars sell online for anywhere from $15 to $75, those embossed with the words “The Clyde” usually sell for higher prices.

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 "folk art" in the 2023 Winter 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.