Thomas Scheetz, Harvard University
Ceramic wares have long proved themselves humanity’s quintessential vessels. Malleable, resourceful, practical, and inspiring, baked clay enjoys unanimous appeal, performing spiritual, artistic, economic, and social functions for an incredible breadth and diversity of civilizations. Bearing a heritage dating back at least twenty-thousand years to cave societies in China, the ceramic experience unites nearly all humans from nearly all time periods, an ever-present essence of ingenuity.[1] Besides clear utilitarian uses, the millennia-spanning practice of decorating pottery broadens the functional scope of ceramics: they are clever tools, but also fundamental modes of human expression. As political expression is a paramount derivative of human expression under organized society, ceramic forms and their decoration have a vivid history of intentional imbuement with political meaning, and even political protest.[2]
Few climates were as conducive to politicization of pottery as was that of the mountainside industrial village at burgeoning Bennington, Vermont during the nineteenth century. Attracted to the area for its multitude of developable advantages—relatively inexpensive land, a powerful river for the spinning of clay-grinding millworks, ready access to turnpikes and trade, and rich kaolin deposits hiding beneath the hills—two conflicting American pottery dynasties came to establish Bennington as their sparring ground by mid-century. Each of their firms produced wares with iconography demonstrating opposition to the other proprietor’s views on several controversial issues of the day.
Some tellings of the tumultuous decades surrounding the American Civil War mistakenly depict the United States as a nation divided cleanly and clearly into two unified, polarizing political regions. Really, difficult exchanges over numerous nuanced issues occurred within states, towns, and even political parties and family units, as exemplified in the antebellum Bennington pottery culture. The proprietors of the two feuding firms were a seemingly unified front: they both identified with the Whig party; they were both descendants of Connecticut-born pottery families; they were in-laws.[3] Indeed, they had operated a pottery firm together for much of the 1840s. It seems surprising that there were irreconcilable differences in personalities and politics between such similar men, and yet these glaringly festered. One of the potters—Christopher Fenton—was imaginative and innovative, always seeking new inventions, new types of wares, and new markets.[4] He envisioned a firm defined by mass production and dealing mostly in specialty ornamental works. The other—Julius Norton—was more traditional and practical, imagining that his firm would continue to hand-make the stoneware jugs, pitchers, and pans that generations of his ancestors had produced.[5] These ideological differences brought an ever-widening fissure to the firm, and by 1847 the firm had fractured into two separate ones.[6]
Divergences in politics between the two potters, as much as their divergences in business acumen and ideology, contributed to driving the drastic schism in the Norton-Fenton firm to a much greater extent than an elaborate corpus of previous literature on Bennington pottery has analyzed. Fundamental disagreements regarding several of the era’s key issues raged between the pair, fomenting a pernicious discord that spelled destruction for the partnership and likely finalized its fracture. Political differences were especially troublesome for a large firm in a town as small as Bennington, where business prominence naturally translated to political fame and where successful industrial leaders were expected to hold some form of public office. Members of the Norton family served as village trustees, school board members, municipal judges and state representatives, and Fenton headed local party clubs and railroad committees; as clay was the fuel for the wealth and stature that catapulted these men to their posts, pottery was unusually central to the area’s governance.[7] Realizing the gravity of the firm and its implications on personal political futures, the potters had much reason to desire a politics-based disassociation. After separating their firms, these potters applied their talents in the ceramic arts towards works whose forms, intended uses, and exterior embellishments conveyed often-oppositional political views on a range of the time’s divisive issues. Pottery in Bennington became a theater for political debate, displaying that ceramic works can and often do carry salient political weight and highlighting the immense role material culture plays in civil discourse.
Political spillover into pottery was in fact predictable in nineteenth-century Bennington, a community wrangling messily with multifaceted issues whose implications sometimes endangered the ceramic industry itself. Early in the century the particularly threatening issue of temperance, or the movement to abstain from the consumption of alcohol, had appeared at the forefront of rural civil discussion across the country and in Bennington. The pottery and distillation industries were necessarily tightly intertwined, the latter’s product often filling that of the former. As such, temperance brought the starkest of tensions to the town and its potter pair. Temperance discourse brought three distinct, simmering schools of rival thought to Bennington. The largest of these camps believed in prohibition, affirming an 1817 report by the Vermont Legislature itself influenced by the previous writings of eminent early doctor Benjamin Rush that alcohol served only “to enfeeble the powers of the mind, to enervate the body, to impair the health, to disqualify for business, to inflame the malignant and other evil passions, to embroil families, to produce poverty, to generate distressing and fatal diseases, and in many instances to occasion sudden death.”[8] A second smaller school of thought, outlined first in an editorial in Bennington’s newspaper responding to the Rush camp, prophesied that prohibition “would have no effect but to produce smuggling, which would be productive of worse consequences than the evil intended to be remedied,” and came to encourage responsible consumption of alcohol via taxation on spirits, but did not go so far as to outlaw consumption entirely.[9] Still another group quite enjoyed their liquors and disavowed any attempts to restrict intoxication, believing that intoxication was to “injure nobody but themselves [the drinkers].”[10] By the mid-nineteenth century the prohibition group claimed theoretical victory in a state prohibitory law ensuring Vermont was to be “dry,” yet with the “wet” town of Hoosick, New York only a state line’s separation from Bennington, the town’s pro-alcohol faction sustained resistance by bootlegging and surreptitiously consuming ardent spirits.[11] Fenton, the head of the Tippecanoe Club of Bennington in 1840, took the position typical of his party and favored abstinence from alcohol, aligning himself with a plurality of the town.[12] The Norton family, meanwhile, favored moderation at best and intoxication at worst. Generations of Nortons had maintained distilleries across town to complement their pottery: one could obtain a large ware from the pottery store, then proceed to the distillery and fill it.[13] Alcohol represented security and stability for their clan; for favorers of abstinence and prohibition like Fenton, it represented destruction and hardship.
Fenton supported the temperance movement principally by circulating temperance pledges for his employees to sign, threatening termination from the firm should employees violate the pledge and placing notices in regional newspapers celebrating employees’ abstinence.[14] In contrast, members of the Norton family took to the kiln to rebuke such extreme interpretations of temperance. Their opposition is most prominently seen in the jug and keg forms that were some of the firm’s most popular and valuable. Where Fenton produced moderately sized pitchers and decorative wares intended for light or no consumption of alcohol, the Norton clan specialized in hulking vessels ostensibly—and sometimes overtly—intended for fermentation, storage, and heavy flow of liquors.
Available in sizes up to thirty-three inches tall and seventeen inches in diameter, these Norton lineups were effectively small barrels of the type used to “harden” cider or share spirits with companions.[15] Some Norton kegs were not used exclusively to supply alcohol—many were used by local inns interchangeably to dispense water or liquor, depending on who was around—but others were explicit in their endorsement of alcohol consumption.[16] One 1830s keg was emblazoned “RUM,” displaying the context in which its use was intended;[17] on an 1864 keg, presented to a friend and political ally of the Nortons to occasion his election to the Vermont Legislature, was scrawled a poem encouraging lively intoxication;[18]Julius Norton’s firm in the 1840s and 1850s boldly maintained and advertised full product lines of “BEER BOTTLES.”[19]
Norton wares expressed their firm’s position on temperance in form and in incisions and stamps, but sometimes they displayed political positions through creative, careful painted decoration. One 1859 keg, made at the Norton works and gifted to firm heir Luman Preston Norton at his graduation from college, provides a fascinating example of a decoratively political Norton work (Figure 1). The mark on this keg denoted the work’s intended contents by employing the polarizing proverb “IN VINO VERITAS”—in wine is truth, so as to say drunkenness reveals one’s true character. It is a striking emblem given the prohibitory law Vermont had enacted six years before the keg’s creation, and indeed, further decorations portray Nortons who were aware of alcohol’s risks but apathetic to its outlaw. Painted on the keg in cobalt blue are two twisting, hissing serpents, exuding from a fruit basket and slithering to the dispensing hole, where they present their agape faces. Bennington Museum curator Jamie Franklin interprets the fruits as “the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” and the emanating snakes as “the Devil, tempting all to indulge.”[20] Such biblical allusions coupled with an opposite ideal—a wreath surrounding the VERITAS stamp—clarify the Nortons’ stance on the liquid within: it is unholy and riotous, but pleasurable nonetheless, and it will be enjoyed regardless of depravity or legislation. Set in brilliant cobalt blue against white stoneware, the decorative ensemble evokes Chinese porcelain, a luxury whose perceived superiority enraptured a demanding West even in spite of widespread horror with working conditions in the kilns firing it.[21] The contents of the jug, then, are prized—not just pleasured—in spite of their sin, like the porcelain the jug implies. Luman Preston Norton, the keg’s grantee, later became Bennington’s Representative to the Vermont General Assembly, where he outlined his family’s views by moving (unsuccessfully) to repeal the prohibitory law in favor of a regulated alcohol market.[22]
The Norton family further lambasted the Vermont prohibitory law by taking aim at its criminal prosecutions, again through pottery, in conjunction with a controversial case in Bennington. In 1879 William McCune, an employee at a large woolen mill just downstream from the Norton works, gained local notoriety after crossing state lines to escape confinement and elude punishment for his intoxication arrest.[23] He was re-captured and involved in several unrelated criminal cases thereafter, but not before catching the Nortons’ attention. Their firm soon produced, perhaps humorously, a crock widely thought to pay tribute to McCune (Figure 2), with a side-profile portrait alongside the text “In-for-ten-years – or Billy McGue’s [sic] CRIME.” Though the potter misspelled McCune’s name, they produced an exceptional object in choosing to depict his humanoid figure. Norton works almost always use plant or animal motifs; only one other Norton ceramic is known to illustrate a face, and that face likely belonged to a member of the Norton family. McCune’s humanoid appearance thus suggests a strong commitment to his epic protest on the part of the potter, especially considering the role of the text inscription. Emphasis placed on the word crime, plus the exaggerated sentencing—McCune was back at home by the enumeration of the Tenth Census in June 1880, one year after the arrest—suggests a mockery of the status of the “crime” as a crime, and a denunciation of the prohibitory law by extension.[24] Produced by a new generation of Norton potters twenty years after the VERITAS keg, the Billy McGue crock represents a novel flavor of an intergenerational tradition of anti-prohibition potter-activism in the Norton family.
The Nortons were the most persistent political potters in Bennington, and they were the only clan to repeatedly engage in kiln-aided activism on the issue of temperance. But Christopher Fenton, the daring prohibitionist entrepreneur and Norton competitor, also came to engage in prolific critique of his time’s political debates through pottery, exposing new viewpoints and nuances. Fenton established a new factory across the river from Julius Norton’s in 1850, incubating what became, for a time, the largest pottery in New England.[25] Employing hundreds of hands to mass-produce novelty wares and small- and medium-sized pitchers, often using exciting new materials like marble-mimicking Parian porcelain and deep brown Rockingham glaze, his firm harnessed industrial technology to propel it quickly to stardom.[26] Plaster molds in the plant shaped raw materials into one of several designs before firing, allowing for uniform, wholesale production of many product lines.[27]
One of the molds produced a small pitcher with a design called “Love and War.” As its name suggests, the design explores opposite themes through two contrasting scenes. One scene is tranquil: a woman lounges atop a horse, a man sits strumming a harp, and both enjoy a nearby tree placed in their middle (Figure 3). The scene is unquestionably warm—the pair are fondly facing each other as lovers, perhaps enjoying tree-shaded relief from a hot summer’s day. Luscious and fuzzy on one side, the pitcher’s design is shocking and gruesome on the other, where two horseback men charge and aim weapons at each other (Figure 4). Significantly, the tranquil tree remains in the background, though it does not participate in the scene. This continuityprompts wondering at how such an irreconcilable atrocity can occur on such seemingly pastoral, peaceful ground.Wrapping around the pitcher underneath its rim, an olive branch unites the two scenes with a classical symbol of peace, providing at once an elaboration on the warmth of the love scene and a condemning contrast to the war scene.
Fenton did not create the “Love and War” design, but rather co-opted it from an earlier English firm, chasing the elusive prestige and esteem of European ceramics.[28] Still, his unique adaptation of the design speaks to the distress of a discordant community in a fledgling nation looking to classical and terrestrial foundations on which to build its future. Most significantly, Fenton chose to mold the design into Parian porcelain, so-called for its imitation of marble from the Greek island Paros. Associated with purity and the Parthenon, marble and its mimicries represented a national yearning for the perceived perfection of ancient Greece. Parian was a new, democratic flavor of this American Greek Revival, exciting for its unprecedented coalescence of beautiful appearance, inexpensive manufacture, and solid practicality. Ceramic reminders of marble, moreover, were sure to enjoy enhanced popularity in Vermont, where marble was not only pure and pretty, but sustaining, through the common occupation of quarrying. Parian was an affordable, practical honorific to a prized figment of Vermont’s natural environment; Fenton’s Parian wares may well have served as widespread additions to the state’s homes. In using such an advantageous material to convey a pacifist message, Fenton signaled his ambition to maximize the reach of that message. It was a particularly poignant and relevant communication in the years of the immediate aftermath of the Mexican-American War, a conflict that killed a well-known Bennington-born colonel.[29]
Competitors in the Norton family, as far as is known, never wrote of their feelings regarding any war, nor made any pottery that supported or abhorred a war outright. Still, there is one work of Norton pottery whose symbolism and curious context suggest an aversion to Fenton’s position on war. It is a large and unique jug produced in the 1840s for Anthony Hathaway, a prosperous farmer living on the outskirts of Bennington (Figure 5). The jug features in high relief a textured ring around the central cavity and a sculpted eagle—each formal modes of adornment rarely attempted in the Norton works. The work’s formality is developed by the carefully sculpted, symmetrical dual handles on top (many Norton works only had one handle), by a handwritten mark identifying the owner carried in the talons of the eagle, and by consideration of the quarters where the work was housed:Hathaway’s newly built farmhouse, brick-walled with granite lintels and a stylish Greek Revival side-hall plan.[30]
Further, the prominent inclusion of the sculpted eagle on such a formal ware is an intensely patriotic choice. Crafted with the buildup to the Mexican-American War, the annexation of Texas, and the Polk administration as backdrops, the eagle as a symbol may denote an approval of the country’s territorial expansion and Manifest Destiny. While it is unclear the extent to which Hathaway, the client, swayed the decision to include the eagle, we can consider that the client’s ideas must extend somewhat to the potter—Hathaway would have likely chosen another supplier had the Nortons not shared his view, and the Nortons may not have otherwise agreed to make an object with such iconography. The eagle jug becomes a political statement first baked by the potter, then displayed in the client’s home; it is harmonizing between the potter and client but polarizing between the two pottery dynasties.
We see in the warring wares a material legacy of the difficulties that the potters’ state and country faced with wrangling the intense political debates of their time. Evidently, convolutions and ramifications in the era’s series of hot-button issues were divisive enough to dislodge an affable and profitable business relationship between interconnected families. Indeed, the temperance issue flared tempers well into the twentieth century, and Americans still struggle with the legacy of their country’s nineteenth-century imperialism. Moreover, the spillover of the time’s disputes into its material culture demonstrates an impressive totality in the region’s participation in governmental debate. That so many instances of politicized Bennington pottery have survived suggests a truly expansive broadcast of ceramic propaganda from the town’s works. It is probable that a great many households in the region displayed and dined from political pottery, a show of great commitment to their respective causes. In the town where militia fighters secured an important victory in the Revolution and where abolitionist agitator William Lloyd Garrison found some of his first readers, political pottery continued a tradition of passion for heavy causes.[31] Vintage ceramic wares as seen in Bennington were more than mere exhibitions of prowess or bystanders to household activities—they were a creative lobby, active participants in the political moment.
Endnotes
[1] Xiaohung Wu et al., “Early Pottery 20,000 Years Ago in Xianrendong Cave, China,” Science 336 (2012): 1696-1700.
[2] See, e.g., Brenda J. Bowser, “From Pottery to Politics: An Ethnoarchaeological Study in Political Factionalism, Ethnicity, and Pottery Style in the Ecuadorian Amazon,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 7 (September 2000): 219-248.
[3] John Spargo, The Potters and Potteries of Bennington (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1926), 103-111.
[4] Spargo, 80-85; Catherine Zusy, Norton Stoneware and American Redware (Bennington, Vt.: The Bennington Museum, 1991), 15.
[5] Spargo, 83.
[6] Vermont Gazette (Bennington, Vt.), November 14, 1847, 3.
[7] Zusy, 39-40; Vermont Union Whig (Rutland, Vt.), January 15, 1846, 3; Vermont Gazette, September 2, 1823, 4; Burlington Free Press (Burlington, Vt.), November 4, 1836, 2; Lewis Cass Aldrich, History of Bennington County, Vermont, (Syracuse, N.Y.: D. Mason & Co., 1889), 306-307.
[8] Vermont General Assembly, “An Address to the Inhabitants of the State of Vermont, on the use of Ardent Spirits,” Vermont Gazette, December 2, 1817, 2.
[9] Vermont Gazette, June 8, 1819, 2.
[10] Vermont Gazette, May 8, 1827, 1.
[11] See “The Liquor Raid,” Bennington Banner (Bennington, Vt.), April 18, 1889, 2, for a description of several speakeasies that emerged in town under the prohibitory law, and of growing discontent with the status quo surrounding alcohol.
[12] J.H. Whitney, “Whig Jubilee,” Vermont Gazette, November 17, 1840, 3.
[13] Zusy, 13, 39; “Manufacturers, Mechanicks, Merchants, Attornies and Physicians’ Register.” Vermont Gazette, January 11, 1831, 1.
[14] “A Great and Good Work,” Brattleboro Eagle (Brattleboro, Vt.), December 16, 1853, 3.
[15] A keg of such lofty size exists in the Bennington Museum collection with catalog number 1975.180 a,b.
[16] One of the largest Norton kegs was owned by the Putnam House, a Bennington hotel, and said to have dispensed water. However, as the Putnam House was the subject of liquor seizures and citations (see, e.g., “Liquor Raid,” Bennington Banner, April 11, 1889, 2), it is likely that the keg was used at least once for naughtier purposes.
[17] Jamie Franklin, “’In Vino Veritas’: A Stoneware Jug and the Contradictions of Temperance,” Gastronomica 9 no. 3 (Summer 2009): 10.
[18] Franklin, 10.
[19] “Bill of J. & E. Norton, Bennington, Vt., June 26, 1856,” reproduced in Lura Woodside Watkins, Early New England Potters and their Wares(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950), 147.
[20] Franklin, 9.
[21] Anne Gerritsen and Stephen McDowall, “Material Culture and the Other: European Encounters with Chinese Porcelain, ca. 1650-1800.” Journal of World History 23, no. 1 (March 2012): 87-113.
[22] Franklin, 10.
[23] Zusy, 47.
[24] U.S. Census Bureau, “Inhabitants in Bennington, in the County of Bennington, State of Vermont,” generated by Charles F. Sears, enumerator, Tenth U.S. Census, 1880.
[25] Victor R. Ronaldo and Catherine Zusy, “Archeology at the United States Pottery Co. Site in Bennington, Vermont,” Journal of Vermont Archaeology 3 (2000): 86.
[26] Zusy, 17.
[27] Watkins, 211.
[28] Watkins, 218 and Spargo, 116.
[29] See, e.g. “Ancient Rifle Presented To Local Lodge,” Bennington Evening Banner, November 12, 1917, 1, for the tale of this colonel—Col. Martin Scott—and the scale of his legend in Bennington.
[30] The house stands today at 1429 Silk Road, Bennington, Vt.
[31] Bennington memorializes each of these figures–Garrison, and the militia fighters at the Battle of Bennington–in monuments. One, the Bennington Battle Monument, stands towering at the center of Monument Circle in Bennington. The other, a smaller marker commemorating Garrison and Journal of the Times, his Bennington newspaper, is found in a small traffic island on Monument Avenue in Bennington.
About the Author
Thomas Scheetz is a first-year at Harvard College who lives in Matthews Hall and is soon to live in Mather House. He has always lived in Bennington, Vermont, and has become interested in the role of the town’s centuries of artistic output in shaping the community. He intends to pursue a double concentration in Social Studies and History of Art of Architecture.