Pottery with a New Orleans Flavor

 

QUESTION: I’ve always liked Arts and Crafts pottery. I understand that women made and decorated some of the different types of that pottery. One particular type that I’ve admired is Newcomb pottery. What can you tell me about it and the women who created it?

ANSWER: The years from the mid-1890s to just before World War I witnessed a progressive movement that affected not only the arts but the way people viewed how things were made.  During the second half of the 19th century, mass production of many products, including pottery, became common. This gave rise to a movement that looked back to when people made it by hand. At the same time, women began to look beyond the home to fulfill their lives. 

Newcomb Pottery was produced from 1895 to 1940. The company grew out of the pottery program at H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, the women's college now associated with Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. The Pottery was a contemporary of other Arts and Crafts potteries, such as Rookwood, North Dakota, Teco, and Grueby.

Pottery decoration was one of the programs offered at the College since other Arts and Crafts potteries, such as the Rookwood Pottery in Cincinnati had begun employing women to decorate their pots This was one field where women could earn money in a respectable manner.

Under the tutelage of Professor William Woodward, advanced Newcomb art students participated in the Tulane Decorative Art League, which combined with the New Orleans Art League Pottery Club to take over the old New Orleans Art Pottery facility in 1890. Students employed their pottery decorating skills here until the Newcomb Pottery was organized in 1895. The Pottery Club encouraged Newcomb students with decorating experience to focus their artistic efforts on wares produced at the school facility. The plan was to establish a pottery program by converting a former chemistry laboratory into a pottery studio so that students could sell their wares and make the program self sufficient.

Two art professors, Ellsworth and William Woodward, who had been members of the faculty since the opening of Newcomb College became the driving forces behind the College’s art school. Ellsworth Woodward developed a curriculum in which women could be trained to earn money in a field other than the already acceptable vocation of teaching.

The first people the Woodwards hired to assist with the new pottery program were the potters. Unlike the artists who created and carved the designs for the Newcomb Pottery, the potters were all men. Even though the College was progressive for its day, the administration believed that only men could work the clay, throw the pots, fire the kiln, and handle the glazing. So they hired men to throw the pots, a task the school considered unladylike, beyond the abilities of the female students, and beneath their dignity  The first potter they hired in 1895 was a Frenchman named Jules Garby 1895. Joseph Meyer, one of Newcomb Pottery's most recognized potters, followed him in 1896, About the same time, the Woodwards hired the eccentric potter George Ohr. His tenure lasted for less than two years, at which time they fired him because they said he was unfit to instruct young ladies. Ohr went on to establish his own pottery in Biloxi, Mississippi in 1897.  

Jonathan Hunt replaced Meyer in 1927 and later Kenneth Smith in 1929. After Hunt left the Pottery in 1933, Francis Ford replaced him. Both Smith and Ford stayed with the Newcomb Pottery program through its termination in 1940.

Eventually, the Pottery designated women who worked regularly in it as craftsmen with a preference given to those who had completed an undergraduate degree and a later graduate studies program with the school’s art department.

The women were responsible for creating and carving designs for each piece of pottery the program produced. During the Pottery’s existence, they created and carved over 70,000 unique pieces.

Early pieces at the Pottery closely reflected the Arts and Crafts style. The pottery often depicted Louisiana's local flora, done in blue, yellow and green high glazes. Newcomb Pottery was at its peak from 1897 to 1917. During that time, the women experimented with various glazes and designs, winning many awards at exhibitions throughout the country and in Europe. 

As the school entered the 1920s, new professors arrived and began to introduce influences from the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art. Highly carved pieces done in matt glazes of blue, green and pink marked this period. The Pottery introduced one of its most famous designs, the "Moon & Moss" style, during this time.

Newcomb Pottery also recruited pottery experts to help improve its product. Among them was Mary Given Sheerer from the Cincinnati area, originally hired to train the students in the slip-decorating techniques popularized at that time by the Rookwood Pottery.

Though training genteel young women was the Pottery’s main goal, the potters and students attempted a number of styles, as they sought to best use the raw materials available in the vicinity of New Orleans. The had originally planned to replicate the contemporary style of the Rookwood Pottery but that failed because slip-painting was unreliable in the hot and humid New Orleans climate. By 1900, Sheerer had to adapt her style, first to biscuit-painted designs and later to incised decorations, both under a high-gloss transparent glaze.

The potters also experimented with the types of clays they used to form the pots. The first clays they used fired either red or buff. A few years later, they used only clays from St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana. They mixed these clays with loam gathered from the banks of the Mississippi River to produce white bodies.

With the end of the First World War, the popularity of the Arts and Crafts Movement waned. What had once seemed attractive and desirable because of its handmade qualities now looked rustic, old-fashioned and amateurish.

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A Cabinet for Chocolates

QUESTION: We recently purchased a Vassar Display Cabinet. It’s in perfect condition with all original glass, shelving, doors, etc. The top was to contain blocks of ice, and there’s a small door at the very bottom where the ice would drain when melting. Is there anything you can tell me about it? I've found very little on the Internet.

ANSWER: You’re the proud owner of a commercial refrigerated chocolate cabinet that would have been used in candy and chocolate shops. At the turn of the 20th century, Vassar Chocolates was one of the top brands of gift-boxed chocolates, similar to Whitman’s today.

But to fully understand your cabinet and the contents it held, we have to look at the background of two companies–the company that made the cabinet and the company that made the chocolates.

The O.D. Royer Manufacturing Company began making refrigerated display cabinets in 1901—a patent date of March 26, 1901 appears on the brass handles on the box doors. They were unique because of their see-through sides. These enabled store and shop owners to display a variety of perishable goods, including chocolates and cheeses. The company moved from Downing, Wisconsin, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, before 1900. However, your cabinet has “Vassar Chocolates” painted on the front. And since Vassar Chocolates weren’t made until 1912, this dates your cabinet to that time.

The iceboxes that Royer Manufacturing made had double panes of glass about one inch apart, something that’s quite common today in double-pane insulated windows. Royer used flax straw to insulate the top ice compartment. It included a beveled mirror on the side opposite the doors. As in today’s pastry and deli display cabinets, the door side probably faced the store clerk for easy access from the back of the cabinet, while the mirror side faced the customer, making it seem as if there were more goods on display than were in the cabinet. As with other iceboxes of the time, the framework and exterior paneling are of oak.

Vassar Chocolates, a type of fudge bon-bon, sold loosely and also packaged in gift tins, were a hot item when they appeared in 1912. The Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company of Kansas City made them along with a variety of other candies and crackers. 

Established in 1902 by Joseph Loose, his brother Jacob, and John. H. Wiles, the company became the second largest manufacturer of crackers in the country by 1912. It had factories in Kansas City, Missouri, Boston, Massachusetts, Chicago, Illinois, Omaha, Nebraska, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Dallas, Texas, and Seattle, Washington, employing nearly 2,000 workers and competed successfully with the National Biscuit Company until the 1930s.

Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company produced not only Sunshine Biscuits, but Vassar Chocolates and a general line of crackers, cakes and fine confectionery, and sold them within a 15-state area surrounding Kansas City. By 1912, it had become the largest combination cracker and candy factory in America, and its facilities for handling business, and also looking out for the welfare of its employees were second to none.

Joseph Loose envisioned a factory which would be filled with sunlight, and Loose-Wiles adopted the name Sunshine for their products. Soon they began expanding and opened new plants in Boston and then New York. In 1912 Loose-Wiles opened their "Thousand Window" bakery on Long Island, which remained the largest bakery building in the world until 1955. When sales began to slump in the 1940s, Loose petitioned the company’s board of directors to change the name to the Sunshine Biscuit Company in 1946, and in 1996, Keebler purchased it. In 2000, Kellogg purchased Keebler. The product it’s best known for is Cheeze-It Crackers.

So how did the chocolates get the name Vassar? It’s no small coincidence that the Vassar Girls, as the students of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, were commonly known, began making chocolate fudge in the late 1880s.

“Nearly every night at college,” said the Vassar girl in a newspaper ad, “some girl may be found somewhere who is making ‘fudges’ or giving a fudge party.” These fudges became known in fashionable circles as Vassar chocolates. Though mystery shrouds their origin, students at Vassar handed down the recipe from year to year. It’s most likely that the recipe, which would have become well known by the turn of the 20th century, would have been easy for Joseph Loose to procure. He added the Vassar name to his chocolate fudge bon-bons to give them class. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Monopoly Way Back When

QUESTION: I recently purchased a box lot at a country auction. In it I discovered a piece of oil cloth on which seems to be drawn a game board much like the one used for Monopoly. However, the names of the streets aren’t the same. Can you tell me anything about this?

ANSWER: What you’ve uncovered is an old game board from the early days of Monopoly.  Before Charles Darrow of Philadelphia commercialized the game and sold the rights to Parker Brothers, people made up their own game boards and used odds and ends for playing pieces.

It all began when Elizabeth (Lizzie) Magie Phillips created a game called “The Landlord’s Game” in 1904. As a proponent of the economic ideas of Henry George, she designed her game to teach the single-tax theory as an antidote to the evils inherent in monopolistic land ownership. It caught on with college students who played it in their dormitory rooms. But since they were often low on cash, they made their own boards.

The Landlord’s Game came in two parts: The first was like Monopoly, a game in which there’s only one winner. But in the second part the game employs the same capitalistic principles but mixes them with a healthy dose of tax reform, to prevent the evils of monopolistic ownership, and then transforms all the players into enlightened winners.

While the game board resembles the one for Monopoly, the names, drawings, colors and the like used on it are different. It’s painted with blocks for rental properties such as "Poverty Place" (rent $50), "Easy Street" (rent $100) and "Lord Blueblood's Estate " (no trespassing - go to jail). There are banks, a poorhouse, and railroads and utilities such as the "Soakum Lighting System" ($50 for landing it) and the "PDQ Railroad" (fare $100). And, of course, there’s the famous "Jail" block. Players could only rent properties on Phillips's board, not acquire them. Otherwise, there’s little difference between The Landlord’s Game and the Monopoly of today.

After Phillips published her game in 1923, it became popular as a grass roots movement. One of the people who became addicted to the game was Ruth Hoskins, a young Quaker woman from Indiana who went to teach at the Atlantic City Friends School in the Fall of 1929. Earlier that year, she learned to play a version of the Landlord's Game, called Auction Monopoly, from her brother, who learned it at college. Early in 1930, Hoskins taught it to her fellow teacher Cyril Harvey and his wife, Ruth, and the Harveys played it with their friends Jesse and Dorothea Raiford. It was Ruth Harvey who drew the first Atlantic City Monopoly board with Atlantic City street names.

The Harveys lent their games to Quakers staying at Atlantic City hotels and also taught their relatives, Ruth and Eugene Raiford, who, in turn taught their friend, Charles Todd, a manager of one of the hotels. Todd then taught the game to his hotel guests Esther and Charles Darrow.

Darrow liked the game so much, he enhanced the design and made 5,000 sets by hand in his basement. He sold these to Wanamaker’s, a highly regarded Philadelphia department store, as well as F.A.O. Schwartz, New York’s famous toy store. A friend of Sally Barton, the wife of the president of Parker Brothers, told her about this new game and the rest, as they say, is history.

The royalties from sales of Monopoly soon made Darrow a millionaire and newspapers touted Darrow as the inventor of Monopoly. And while he made lots of money from it, all he did was organize the game and sell it. Since Phillips had actually created a different game, albeit similar, she had no rights to the game of Monopoly, which had been developed by many people over time, much like the Linux operating system for computers.

For more information, read Pass Go and Collect on Early Monopoly Games.