A Re-evaluation of Early Woodstock Potteries
By Warren F. Broderick
My research and writing on historic American ceramics to date has concentrated on potteries in upstate New York State and adjoining Bennington, Vermont. My interest in potteries in eastern and central Vermont began with a complete reassessment (not yet published) of potteries in St. Johnsbury. My research led to the discovery of a previously unknown redware pottery in Quechee and also demonstrated the need to re-evaluate published information on potteries in Woodstock.
As a general rule, little useful detailed information is found in the traditional published works on New England potteries. Coverage in John Spargo’s Early American Pottery and China (1926) and John Ramsay’s American Potters and Pottery (1939) is minimal. Lura Watkins devoted a few pages to Vermont redware potteries in her classic 1950 work, Early New England Potters and their Wares, known for many years as the definitive book on the subject. But Watkins’s book contains many errors and omissions, and lacking notes and other references, cannot be relied on without further verification of her sources. Two published local histories were consulted, Mary Grace Canfield’s somewhat fanciful The Valley of the Kedron (1940) and Henry Swan Dana’s 1889 History of Woodstock, Vermont. Writing closer to the actual era the potteries were functional, Dana seems to have been far more accurate in his historical statements.
What resources were not consulted by authors and historians working more than seventy years ago? Certainly research has been rendered much easier because of automation, in particular Internet family history sites. Some of these sites contain copies of historic records such as census population schedules, deeds and mortgages, cemetery records, immigration and travel documents, and birth, death and marriage records. While the Internet has greatly increased access to these records, one must understand that they may be incomplete or inaccurate and that indexing and searching issues may be present. Original, microfilmed or imaged records may nonetheless need to be consulted.
While Early New England Potters and their Wares remains the most comprehensive work on the subject, Watkins rarely mentions having consulted local government records other than minutes or proceedings of Select Boards and their predecessors which contain few specific references to potteries. She seems to have ignored deeds, mortgages and grand lists maintained by Town or City Clerks in Vermont. All contain valuable information on potteries and the land they occupied. Records of probate courts and various courts of civil jurisdiction are not cited in her work as well. Many counties have since transferred their older court records to the Vermont State Archives.
Early newspapers are occasionally mentioned by Watkins but this resource is now far more easily searchable since some are available digitally on the Internet and still more, but not all, have been reproduced on microfilm. Other sources of information include results of archaeological investigations of pottery sites and ceramic collections of historical societies and museums.
My interest in the history of the Woodstock potteries arose purely accidentally. During a visit to the Woodstock History Center on an unrelated matter, I observed two attractively displayed nineteenth-century pottery items.
One was a two-gallon blue decorated semi-ovoid stoneware jar marked “DIV. NO. 288 / SOUTH WOODSTOCK VT.” While there is no maker’s or owner’s name on the pot, it was attributed to a local resident named Monroe McKenzie (1805-1883) by Mary Grace Canfield in The Valley of the Kedron. Her attribution was accepted ten years later without question by Lura Watkins. Mrs. Canfield’s attribution is based solely on the fact that a home acquired by McKenzie in 1827 had the ruins of some kind of brick structure adjacent to the house that was demolished by a subsequent owner.
Stoneware jar marked “South Woodstock.”
Both the form of the jar and the decoration, a multi-branched plant or a fern, are very similar to a number of stoneware vessels bearing the marks of Burlington and Fairfax, Vermont, potteries, made from the late 1830s to the early 1850s. Monroe McKenzie, a cobbler by profession who had a shop in South Woodstock, left the town as early as 1831, moving to nearby Windsor, and eventually settling in Palmyra, Wisconsin, by 1850. There is no documentation that he was ever a potter. The ‘DIV. NO. 288” stamp is puzzling. No lots of land in South Woodstock ever were assigned that high a number in the original eighteenth century allotment when the town was founded. Constructing and firing a stoneware kiln was a far more complex task compared to a smaller kiln to fire earthenware. The chance that a stoneware kiln was in use for a few years in South Woodstock and produced only a handful of salt-glazed jars is highly unlikely. These were probably bought from the Burlington or Fairfax pottery for use by some local resident, possibly a merchant, after Monroe McKenzie had left Woodstock. A visit to the house on Fletcher Schoolhouse Road and a conversation with the present owner provided no indication a pottery was ever located there. The so-called pottery kiln appears to have instead been an exterior dome-like brick structure that was part of a baking oven.
Detail from Beers 1869 Map of Woodstock showing the south east corner of the town, including District Number 17.
As many as three early earthenware potteries, however, operated in Woodstock and another potter lived in the town for a few years. The first potter appears to have been a man named Daniel Edson. Henry Swan Dana, in his 1889 History of Woodstock, Vermont, states that potter, Moses Bradley, when he arrived in West Woodstock in 1800, had “the field free” to conduct his business because “a man by the name of Edson had been engaged in the pottery business here for some years before this but he was now gone.” A likely candidate for this person is Daniel Edson (1741-1816) from Bridgewater, Massachusetts, who was residing in the northwest part of Rockingham, Vermont, in the early 1780s where he is found on a 1781 list of voters and married his second wife, Elenor Richards, in 1783. In July of 1788, he is found on a tax list in Woodstock but by 1790 had removed to nearby Reading and by 1800 to Springfield, Vermont, where he died in 1816. In 1783 Edson purchased 40 acres of land from Samuel Slayton described as “the east end of lot No. two in the fourth range in the south part of the Township.” He disposed of the land in deeds recorded in 1786 and 1787 that refer to a schoolhouse and sawmill in the extreme southeast corner of the town, an area referred to as the “Slayton-Ralph District” or School District No. 17. Historian Dana apparently meant the entire town when he described Edson’s pottery as having been “here” a few years before the arrival of Moses Bradley. The deeds of sale list Daniel Edson as a “carpenter,” so ceramics must have been his secondary occupation. Neither the exact location of his short-lived pottery nor any wares produced there have been identified.
Dana on page 76 mentions that William Burtch had a pottery “attached to the concern” along with other businesses. I assume he meant somewhere in Woodstock, but his house - built in 1786 - now owned by the State, stands in the Town of Hartford just west of Quechee. Was the pottery and other businesses located in Woodstock or in Quechee? We may never know because Burtch (1762-1816) was involved in a number of varied commercial enterprises and owned multiple parcels of property prior to his removal to Ohio in 1808.
Woodstock’s single documented potter was Moses Bradley (1765-1826) from Haverhill, Massachusetts, who settled at Chimney Point on Lake Champlain in the Town of Addison, Vermont, in 1790. He married Deborah West at Concord, New Hampshire, in 1791, but there is no evidence that he operated a pottery in that place. While the reason for his move to Addison is not known, Bradley’s pottery site has been located near the bridge to New York State and the historic Barnes tavern. Kiln furniture from his pottery and broken pieces of pottery, some bearing the potter’s finger prints, are on display at the Chimney Point State Historic Site. While most of the sherds came from ordinary looking utilitarian redware, at least one piece exhibits slip decoration. Moses did not own land in Addison and according to one reputable source “stayed in” Windsor, Vermont, for two or three years before settling in Woodstock in June of 1800. The following year a law suit by Truman Town of Willsboro, New York, brought in Windsor County Court was rejected because Bradley’s debt, first litigated in a Justice’s Court, was now considered canceled. This likely resolved a matter dating from Bradley’s tenure at Chimney Point a decade earlier that could no longer be properly adjudicated.
Pieces of broken pottery attributed to Moses Bradley. These pieces are believed to have been made by Bradley at Chimney Point in the 1790s, before Bradley moved to Woodstock.
Photo courtesy of the Consulting Archaeology Program, UVM.
Corner of Rose Hill and Prosper Road in West Woodstock. According to written accounts, Moses Bradley’s pottery works was located just to the west of this intersection. In early times, what is now the hamlet of West Woodstock was referred to as “Bradley Flats” (or “The Flats” for short).
Bradley acquired a house in West Woodstock on the north side of the road to Bridgewater (the current US Route 4) in 1803, formerly owned by Col. Joseph Safford. This locale became known as “Bradley Flats.” His pottery was established “for the manufacture of cream pots, jugs, pitchers and milk-pans” just to the west. His land transactions reflect his financial difficulties. The house lot and pottery he purchased from Jesse Safford in 1803 was immediately mortgaged to Jesse Williams and the mortgage was only satisfied following his death by Bradley’s son, John, in 1828. In 1819 he sold the house lot to his son, subject to terms of the 1803 mortgage. This sale was surely necessitated by the financial problems that sent Moses to “debtors’ prison.”
Above: Articles in local papers about Moses Bradley, his confinement because of his debts, and the sale of his pottery business.
About 1817 Bradley moved downtown for a while and boarded with Simeon Washburn in a house on the north side of Pleasant Street near its junction with Central Street. He set up a pottery in a blacksmith shop across the street using clay from a bank near the Ottauquechee River or the Kedron Brook. The reason for his temporary move is not known nor is the exact date he returned to West Woodstock. Financial difficulties and possible family issues were likely responsible.
Moses Bradley’s son, John, took charge of the pottery in 1824 and continued the business until the death of Moses on February 14, 1826. In 1824 he sold his newer house lot on Rose Hill Road to John; the deed indicates that his “potters shop” had also been removed to this eastern and upland location.
In an 1824 advertisement in the Woodstock Observer, John Bradley also mentions his need for a few cords of hemlock wood possibly for firing the kiln. Writing a century later, Mary Grace Canfield stated that during his later years Moses Bradley resided near her residence on Mount Tom Road, now known as Rose Hill Road, in a house later owned by Payson Pierce and since demolished. John W. Bradley only continued his father’s business for a year or two following his father’s passing.
Above: Taller mug on the right has long been part of the History Center’s collection. It is attributed to Moses Bradley. The shorter mug on the left, which is similar in shape and boasts similar band decorations, was recently donated to the History Center by Warren Broderick. It is believed that this unusual mug was also done by Bradley or someone working in his shop. Photo by Tara Wray.
While his pottery was said to be quite productive, the only known redware pieces attributed to Bradley are matching brown-glazed earthenware mugs with incised circular bands owned by the Woodstock History Center. More recently the Center has received the donation of a similar barrel-shaped mug bearing a more reddish lead glaze with manganese blotches. Justin Thomas, a noted redware scholar and author, has observed a similarity to mugs produced at the Bayley Pottery in Newburyport, Mass. ca. 1764-1799, surmising that Moses Bradley may have apprenticed at this pottery.
“A Card” placed in the January 18, 1819, issue of the Vermont Journal reads:
MOSES BRADLEY wishes to express his sincere thanks to the inhabitants of this vicinity, of all ages and sexes, for their friendly kindness and unwearied assistance, to his afflicted family, during their recent scenes of tribulation; and his humble gratitude to the citizens who have been very liberal in their charitable favours.
Moses may have been referring to the death of his twenty-three-year-old son, William, who died the previous November 28th. Also, Bradley was experiencing serious financial difficulties at the time, in fact placing this “NOTICE” in the Journal the following August 19th:
Notice is hereby given, that the subscriber will prefer [sic] his petition to the legislature, next to be held at Montpelier on the second Thursday of October next, for an act of suspension of his debts for five years, and for liberation from his present imprisonment. MOSES BRADLEY
Moses was successful as the State Legislature enacted Chapter LXVI of the Acts and Resolves whereby he was freed from arrest or imprisonment for debt for the next five years. He needed to have attested copies of the Legislative Act on hand to show any “officer or jailor” if necessary. Imprisonment merely for debt was not abolished in Vermont until 1838.
While we may, if fortunate, learn about the location, longevity, finances and production of pottery ventures, we rarely glean any information on the potters themselves beyond the basic genealogical data. In the case of Moses Bradley, we have not only learned something about problems he faced from his newspaper postings but the recollections of two Woodstock residents provide additional insights into the man and his craft. In 1869 George Safford of Rockford, Illinois, grandson of the builder of the Bradley house, in spite of his biases, provided insights about Moses and his family in his memoirs:
He was a low, profane, sort of man, his wife was more intelligent but not religious. They had four boys, two older and two younger than myself which I played with and rather looked up to, but as they had no moral training they were by no means the right sort of companions. They had a great deal of leisure time for play and fishing etc. and would often come where I was at work to entice me away and I wish I could go with them and have as good times and they did. Once or twice they coaxed me away and I got a good whipping for it in their presence which was truly a double punishment. . . . Whatever other evil they exerted over me they never learned me to swear, for I always had a great abhorrence over that vice.
Norman Williams as an adult. When he was a child, Norman Williams’ family lived just up the Hill on what is now called the King Farm.
Norman Williams recalled that Moses Bradley always welcomed visitors, particularly housekeepers, and groups of school children who were permitted in their leisure time to visit the pottery. Williams remarked that:
. . . . from a lump of clay put on his wheel he would draw up a structure which would turn out to be a vase, a pitcher, or a jug. If a vase, the walls would be carried up perpendicularly; if a pitcher, when the sides were carried up, he would at some place on the rim put his thumb on the outside and his finger on the inside and bend down the slope, which would be the pitcher’s nose; and if a jug, he would put both hands across the upper part of the vessel and contract it, and around the forefinger of his left hand he would bring up the top of the vessel to form the nose of the jug. I admired to watch this handicraft, but the converting of dull bars of lead into a brilliant red powder and then a red glazing --- a liquid with which the outside of the pottery were washed --- was a mystery which, in my ignorance of chemistry, seemed to savor of witchcraft and necromancy.
Detail from a listing in the Woodstock Observer of Ebenezer Hutchinson’s items to be sold.
Another potter spent a few years of his life in Woodstock, but his time as an active potter was completed. Ebenezer Hutchinson, Jr., (1787-1855), a redware potter from Lyndeborough, New Hampshire, established a pottery in Quechee in 1815. He is the first potter known to have produced redware maple sap buckets. Ebenezer was also an inventor and an accomplished engraver, publishing a series of editions of James Whitelaw’s State-endorsed Map of Vermont through the early 1820s. Financial success did not follow, however, and Ebenezer sold most of the contents of his house, along with books, maps and “brown ware, sold in small lots” at an auction held at his property in Quechee on October 4, 1823, “to keep him from [debtors’] prison.”
Early 1850s view of Edson’s Row on the south side of Central Street. Ebenezer Hutchinson moved to this area in 1825 after leaving Quechee Village.
He moved to Woodstock in 1825 and executed copper-plate printing, produced maps and even dug and stoned cellars for houses. He took up an upstairs room in No. 4 Edson’s Block, which stood on the south side of Central Street, where he placed a somewhat unusual notice in the Woodstock Observer where he encouraged persons either owing him money or vice versa to settle their accounts. He stated that it was “not in his power at this time to call on his friends in person, especially those out of the village,” therefore a third party had to intervene. He may have been under some kind of court-ordered house arrest in lieu of being sent to debtors’ prison. He further stated that his former engraving business was now conducted by Messrs. Barron and Russ in Quechee, but Hutchinson offered to trade maps and books for “old cotton and linen sheets” for map linings. In his 1829 quit-claim deed, he released his rights to any property he owned in Quechee. Ebenezer also relinquished his right to publish the official state map in 1826 to the noted globe maker, James Wilson, of Bradford.
Woodstock Observer and Windsor and Orange County Gazette, February 15 1825
In addition, Hutchinson informed the public that his “Pyroligneous acid, or essence of smoke” for curing hams now had to be obtained from merchants in Hartford, Barnard and Royalton. The record of his (second) marriage to Betsy Watson in 1827 calls him a Woodstock resident, but by 1828 he had removed to Barnard where their 1850 Federal Census lists him as a “laborer.” The Renaissance man of many talents who struggled to make ends meet died of consumption in West Randolph on October 8, 1855. His life and remarkable career will the subject of a future article.
Information contained in published sources from the 20th Century on Vermont potteries, including town histories, should not be accepted without examining, where possible, the original source materials these authors consulted, especially archival records. This detailed, admittedly time-consuming, research methodology could be applied to the study of Vermont industries other than potteries.