Carrying on a 150-Year-Old Pottery Tradition

Catawba Valley swirlware vase

QUESTION: Last Fall, I discovered several pieces of pottery with a swirl design at a local antiques show. The dealer called it Catawba Pottery but couldn’t tell me much more than it had been made somewhere in Appalachia. What can you tell me about this pottery? And where did it originate?

ANSWER: Catawba Valley Pottery describes an alkaline glazed stoneware made in the Catawba River Valley of Western North Carolina from the early 19th century to the present day.

Early Catawba pottery jar

Before modern conveniences such as electricity, plastic and refrigeration, pottery jugs. jars and crocks stored a family's perishables. A springhouse or pantry were the equivalent of the Frigidaire. Local potters were essential. When refrigeration and inexpensive glass came to the South between 1900 and 1930, the use of pottery to store food declined. However, a few potters in North Carolina's Catawba and Lincoln counties began making pottery for tourists attracted to the small stoneware pots with their distinctive alkaline glaze. The smarter potters kept their traditional pottery-making ways and shapes, but added customer-friendly swirl pitchers, miniatures, exotic vases, umbrella stands and, in a burst of creative marketing, face jugs.

Beginning with river-dug clay, potters turned milled clay on a foot-powered wheel, glazed the green-ware with a slurry of wood ashes, powdered glass, clay and water, and then fired it in a pine fueled ground hog kiln nestled against a hillside. This has been an unbroken 150-year-old tradition.



Stoneware, hard but not as brittle as earthenware, is durable, vitreous, easy to clean and non-toxic. Its strength made it ideal for the 5- to 20-gallon food storage jars needed by 19th-century farmers.

Catawba Valley potters used alkaline glazes on their wares

Catawba Valley potters used alkaline glazes in shades of brown or green instead of the commonly used salt glaze. Potters from Edgefield, South Carolina, originally brought alkaline glazes to the Catawba Valley. These potters made alkaline glazes by combining hardwood ash or crushed glass with clay and water. Catawba potters had an abundance of wood ash from burning their kilns but didn’t have plentiful salt deposits in their region.

The Catawba potters initially fired their alkaline glazed wares in what were known as "groundhog kilns." These kilns were a unique southern U.S. variation of climbing kilns built into hillsides. Semi-subterranean in construction, the groundhog kiln featured a door leading into a long, low passage of brick or rock construction, with a stack or chimney poking out of the ground up hill. Potters loaded pieces in the low passageway or "ware-bed" and built a fire in a sunken firebox, located just inside the door. The design allowed the stack to draw heated air, flames and ash through the pottery grouped inside and created the draft needed to generate the intense heat required to create stoneware. This type of firing or "burning " worked particularly well with large pieces of pottery. Contemporary Catawba Valley potters still use variations of these kilns, usually referred to as "tunnel kilns."

Pre-Civil War bulbous jug

Before the Civil War, jars from the area were bulbous with a flared top, gradual widening body, fat waist, and narrow base. After the war, jars maintained the same overall shape, but got bigger and fatter. By the 1930s, influenced by Ohio pottery jars, they became straight-walled, open top cylinders.

Jugs held all kinds of liquids from water to whiskey. During the 1920s and 1930s, Catawba potters added faces to these jugs, easily identified by their strap handle, pulled in shoulder and narrow spout. Catawba Valley potter Harvey Reinhardt was one of the first to produce this grotesque, but extremely popular form. However, potters made few face jugs until Burlon Craig, who produced thousands between the late 1940s and the present day.

Early Catawba Valley potters also made swirlware. Made by layering light and dark clays, they created a swirl pattern by moving diagonally up and around the body of a jug, jar, pitcher, birdhouse, vase, or dozens of other forms.

Burlon Craig face jug

Among the 150 to 200 potters scattered throughout the area between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a dozen individuals and two families stand out. Neighbors Daniel Seagle and Sylvanus Hartsoe were two of the most prolific potters with signed pieces surfacing at area auctions and antique shops. The meticulous work of Samuel Propst, called 'the best turner of all" by Burlon Craig, is less frequently seen. Enoch and Harvey Reinhardt were business partners between 1932 and 1936. Many of their larger pieces, produced by Enoch, and small tourist items, Harvey's specialty, have the stamp "Reinhardt Bros,/Vale, N.C." The Propsts and Reinhardts began making blurred, mottled edged swirlware in about 1930.

Two area families also produced several generations of potters. The Ritchie family, the largest, began making pottery with Moses and ended their work, 12 potters later, at the death of Luther in 1940. Producing 10 noted potters, the Hilton family established a half dozen potteries in and around the valley. By the 1920s, they dallied in decorated dinnerware and figurines for the tourist trade which locals called "fancyware." The Hilton family pottery-making business ended in 1939 or 1940. Crisscrossing nearly all of the prominent families as an apprentice, neighbor or co-worker, is Burlon Craig. It was he who kept traditional 19th-century pottery-making alive and continuous.

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19th Century Tupperware

QUESTION: I recently won a box lot at a local auction. Inside the box I found what looks like a cup with an attached saucer. It’s heavy and a bit crude. Can you tell me what it is?

ANSWER: What you have is a 19th-century grease lamp made of stoneware. Farmers used these lamps, fueled by animal fat, in their homes. They often threw away early, less refined versions, as better ones appeared on the market. 

Stoneware is one of the hardy perennials of the American antiques trade. Each year, auction houses, antiques shops, and flea markets sell thousands of pieces at prices from $25 to several thousand dollars. The record price stands at $15,000 for a rare 1773 stoneware inkstand. Only a handful of pieces fetch prices in that stratospheric range.

Stoneware is a heavy, hard pottery that resists odors and tastes and won’t absorb water. The first American stoneware appeared in the last half of the 18th century, and for more than 100 years people used stoneware vessels to store and transport foods and liquids. It was essentially the 19th-century version of Tupperware. When glass and metal containers came into common use, people stopped using it.

Generally, it’s difficult to date stoneware unless a piece has the name and town of the maker or the name of the company that used the vessel to hold its product stamped on the bottom. For this reason, many collectors like to buy pieces made in their areas. But stoneware that can be identified as the work of an early potter may be worth several hundred dollars. For example, a double-handled crock inscribed "Commeraw" sold for $800 because it was made by Thomas Commeraw, a New York City potter active from 1795 to 1820. At a Massachusetts auction, a jug with the initials J. F. sold for $600—it’s attributed to a 1790's Boston potter named Jonathan Fenton. Sometimes the initials on a piece belong not to the maker but to the original owner, which makes the piece attractive to collectors interested in genealogy.

As with many other antiques, age isn’t the main reason in determining the price of an object—its decorative qualities are far more important. An attractive late-19th-century jug will fetch more at auction than a homely Revolutionary-era piece. Most stoneware forms, such as jugs, crocks, jars, churns, and pitchers, are very simple and vary only slightly in shape and design. Decoration, if any, tends to be sparse. When a potter decorated his pieces, he often used simple floral, bird, or scroll motifs painted on the stoneware in three basic colors—blue, brown, or black. The most common stoneware style has a gray-glazed background with blue decoration. Such run-of-the-mill pieces, which represent about 90 percent of the stoneware available today, are generally worth less than $50.

Because many stoneware items look alike, the most valuable pieces are those with unusual or imaginative decoration. A rare form, such as your stoneware grease lamp, or an odd-sized piece, an exceptionally large crock, for example, can be worth several hundred to several thousand dollars.

Predicting the Value of Farmer’s Almanacs

QUESTION:  I happen to come into about 20 old and different Farmer’s Almanacs ranging in issue dates from 1867 to 1930.  I haven't been able to find any information on them. Is there a link you can refer me to so I can get an idea of their value?

ANSWER: Before looking at how to determine the value of your almanacs, it’s important to note that over the last two centuries there have been several almanacs with the name “Farmer’s” in them. Benjamin Franklin first published his now famous Poor Richard’s Almanac back in the 1732 and continued doing so until 1758. At its peak, Franklin printed over 10,000 copies for each edition.

By the late 18th century, many almanacs included the term “Farmer’s” in their titles because the young nation was mostly one of farmers who wanted to know what the weather would be like for the coming year, so they would know when to plant and harvest their crops. Accurate weather prediction meant the difference between survival and starvation.

Of the two publications known today as farmer’s almanacs, the Old Farmer's Almanac, originally published in 1792 and still published every September, is the most widely known. Begun by Robert Thomas, it’s first editor, the Old Farmer's Almanac grew from a circulation of 3,000 copies to over 9,000 in just three years. The cost was only nine cents. Thomas added the word "Old" to the title of his almanac in 1832, then removed it three years later.

Since Thomas’ almanac format wasn't unique, perhaps his weather predictions were more accurate. Based on his observations, Thomas devised a complex series of natural cycles to create a secret weather forecasting formula, resulting in unusually accurate forecasts.

John H. Jenks bought the publication after Thomas died, then put the word “Old” back in the title in 1848. Three years later, Jenks hired Henry Nichols to create the Almanac’s trademark four-seasons cover that has remained with the periodical ever since.

In 1861, Charles L. Flint became editor and focused the Almanac’s content on farming to provide his growing readership with information they could use. By 1900, the Old Farmer’s Almanac had yet another editor, Horace Ware, who aimed the publication beyond farmers to a more general readership by using features on nature and modern life instead of farming..

After surviving the World War I and the Depression, the Old Farmer’s Almanac entered a new era under the leadership of Roger Scaife who became editor in 1936. Its circulation had fallen from a high of 225,000 in 1863 to just 88,000. He mistakenly eliminated the weather forecasts, thinking that his readers didn’t need them, and almost killed the publication.

Robb Sagendorph, owner of Yankee Magazine, bought the Old Farmer's Almanac in 1939 and moved it to Dublin, New Hampshire. He reinstated Thomas’ original format and style the readership of the publication began to grow once again.

The other publication, known simply as the Farmers' Almanac, has been in continuous publication since 1818. David Young and Jacob Mann founded their little publication in Morristown, New Jersey two years after what has come to be known as “the year without a summer.” During that year, farmers crops suffered severely from the unusual weather, so Young and Mann decided to create a publication which would offer them accurate weather forecasts to prevent a disaster like that from happening again.

Astronomer Samuel Hart Wright succeeded Young in 1851to become the second of only seven editors of the publication. Eventually, the publication’s offices moved from Morristown to nearby Newark, New Jersey.

Ray Geiger served as the Farmers’ Almanac's longest-running editor, from 1934 until shortly before his death in 1994. In 1955, he moved production of the Farmers' Almanac from Newark to its current headquarters in Lewiston, Maine. Today, his son, Peter Geiger continues to publish the Almanac.

Published by the Almanac Publishing Company, of Lewiston, Maine, the Farmer’s Almanac has become noted for its long-range weather predictions. Its readers claim the Almanac is 80-85 percent accurate in its predictions. But studies comparing the actual weather with the Almanac’s predictions have shown that the predictions aren’t any more accurate than pure chance.

Although the editors of the Farmer’s Almanac make predictions as far as two years in advance, they’re . re highly secretive about how they go about making them, only saying that they rely on astronomical data like the positions of the planets, sunspot activity, and tidal action. To put an identity to the forecasts, the editors created a fictitious forecaster Caleb Weatherbee.

Writing to down-home farmer folk, the almanac has also included its own special blend of advice on farming, gardening, fishing, and cooking over the years, as well as human-interest articles. Its editors have continually focused on the themes of simplicity, sustainable living, and conservation.

Old copies of both the Old Farmer’s Almanac and the Farmer’s Almanac abound. Since each was the farmer’s best companion and popular with even regular people for its weather predictions, there are a lot of old copies hidden in people’s attics and basements. Unfortunately, these aren’t always in the best condition. And as with any other collectible, especially paper ones, condition is of prime importance when determining value. The earlier issues from the 19th century, printed on paper high in rag content, are usually in much better condition, but dampness can play a big role in paper deterioration. But even in the best condition, the sheer number of copies out there prevent the value from becoming too high.

The average selling price on eBay for a late 19th-century copy of the Old Farmer’s Almanac from say the 1870s is only about $12-15. Editions from the 1920s sell for only about $4. Abebooks.com, an online used bookseller, has an 1890 edition in fair condition priced at just $9.

And while these prices are a far cry from the publication’s original price, these little gems are probably more fun to read than to consider as an investment.