Lecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, February 24th, 2011

The Utah Pottery Project: Historical and Industrial Archaeology of a Pioneer Industry

Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and Program in Archaeology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Location: 209A Davenport Hall, Thurs., February 24, 3:00 pm

Presented by Dr. Timothy Scarlett

Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies

Industrial Heritage and Archaeology

Department of Social Sciences

Michigan Technological University

The Utah Pottery Project began as a study of the social business of potting in nineteenth-century Utah, one of the “folk hearths” of the United States. In establishing the project, I sought to design a study that capitalized upon archaeology’s interdisciplinary potential in the broadest sense of that term, intertwining the sciences, arts, and humanities in a single intellectual effort. Now that we have demonstrated the power of this approach, the study is evolving in two directions. First, my collaborators and I continue expanding archaeometric and historical analyses of trade and exchange, tracing routes of social interaction and weighing their significances. At the same time, we have begun detailed, ecobiographic studies of individual potters, shops, and potting groups. Immigrant potters had backgrounds that varied from industrial workers and managers to artisanal apprentices in many different social and technological contexts. The colonization of Utah provides an opportunity to study individuals engaged in social processes which otherwise appear as anonymous in the archaeological record, of particular interest are technological creativity, technology transfer, adaptation, and landscape learning.

Carol Adams Wright, 1908-2009

This weekend, I was saddened to learn that "Christmas Carol" Wright died last October.  I had not heard the news until now, so I set aside a moment in my workday this morning to reflect on Mrs. Wright's contributions to the Utah Pottery Project research effort.

Mrs. Wright was Thomas and Sarah Davenport's great-granddaughter.  Carol was born to Thomas Davenport Adams and Luella Redd Adams on Christmas day in 1909, an event for which she earned her nickname "Christmas Carol."  The potters, Thomas and Sarah Davenport, were Carol's father's mother's parents.  Carol's grandmother's siblings spent their youth working in the pot shop, perhaps also her grandmother at times. Carol's father worked at the shop when he was young and also spent his youth paying amid the shop's ruins before they were torn down.

Carol was practically a living eye-witness with first-hand knowledge of a Utah pottery.  When I first met her in 1999, her memories of her youth and the stories told by her parents and grandparents were still sharp and clear records of the mid-nineteenth century.  She welcomed me into her home and shared all her knowledge with me, at a time when I was a total stranger in the community.  I had simply knocked on her door to ask about the history of empty lot next door.  The sketch map that I drew with Mrs. Wright in 1999 guided our excavations and her stories helped us to find the shop's clay beds.

To the best of my knowledge, she was the last person in that generation in the entire state of Utah.  The last to talk with people that had worked at potting to make a living.  While some may still recall the Ogden or Provo factories of the 1920s and 30s, Carol had living memory from a pioneer-era pot shop.

I will forever be grateful that Mrs. Wright shared her stories with me.  She was trusting, open, and kind when I was a young student-researcher, living out of my old truck, and walking around town with little else except my dusty notebook and enthusiasm.

Rest in peace, Mrs. Wright.  Thank you.

Several Utah newspapers and ABC News 4 printed her Obituary last October, in 2009.

Geophysics and Family History

Here are the results of today's magnetometry survey!  

In 2000, I interviewed Mrs. Carol Wright in Parowan.  Mrs. Wright is Thomas and Sarah Davenport's granddaughter.  She was born in 1908, which means she is 100 years old this year. Thomas Davenport died in 1888, twenty years before she was born.  Her father had worked in the pottery as a youngster, however, and she remembered the general description of the property even though the old adobe home and workshop buildings had been torn down before she was born.  

Below you can make a side-by-side comparison between the sketch I made with Mrs. Wright and the map of magnetic anomalies.  

I marked areas of interest to our excavation on the magnetic image below:

Based upon the magnetic anomalies, we think the basic description of the kilns' location and sizes are pretty accurate.  Family histories say that they were "about fourteen feet across."  There were several, perhaps three or four lined up in the back.  We are going to locate our excavation trench to expose one side of the kilns.  We'll leave the other side for future archaeologists, since they will certainly be better scientists than we are today.

We have begun surface collections of the site, grid by grid.  I expect we will start excavations on Friday.

Stay tuned!

Maps- Where did potters live and work?

Utah's immigrant potters left several different countries of origin.  Many left from Denmark and the United Kingdom, particularly Staffordshire and the English Midlands.  Other European-born potters came from Germany and Norway.  Potters also migrated from other parts of the United States, including from New York, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri:

Individual potters could settle wherever they wished, but many chose to take on missions to settle specific towns and regions.  The leaders of the Latter-day Saints sought to settle a chunk of the Rocky Mountain and Great Basin regions of the United States which they called Deseret. Brigham Young and his advisors led "the gathering" of people to the headquarters at Salt Lake City and then organized them into settlement companies sent throughout the region.

This pattern of settlement, guided/directed and open/undirected, led to potters distributed through the area.  Each blue dot in the map below indicates a pottery.  Overlapping dots represent multiple potteries in a single town.  Keep in mind that some of these dots are interpretative arguments- we don't always know who partnered together and who worked independently.  

Latter-day Saints established some potteries outside of Utah's modern borders:

Potteries within the modern political boundaries of Utah:

We are building a "map" of the potter's marks.  The upcoming museum exhibit will present all that we know about the different potter's marks:

Object of the Week, 4/1/09

This week's remarkable object is a potter's rib from the Eardley's Deseret Pottery site.  A number of different potters were involved in this company, including the three Eardley brothers: James, John, and Bedson.  At times, John Cartwright and Jonah Croxall also worked at this site in Salt Lake City, but during that time the pottery had a different name.

In the 1970s, a Utah State Liquor store was built on the site.  For whatever reason, an archaeological survey was not conducted before construction.  Lucky for modern scholars, Nancy Richards walked by one day.  Ms. Richards was a curator for State Parks and she happened to be researching Utah's nineteenth century potteries.  She was shocked by what she saw in the backdirt and as I have heard the story, she called up to the University of Utah for help.  A group of archaeology students came down and they all spent some time frantically putting fragments of things in boxes.  That collection, which has never been exhibited to the public before, will be a large part of the collection on exhibit.

A potter uses a rib as a carpenter uses a profile gauge.  The rib's shape matches that of the preferred shape of a particular pottery vessel or object.  While the wet shape spins upon the wheel, the potter holds the rib up against the vessel to be certain that it has the desired shape and size.  The rib helps the potter to throw things "freehand" but stay close to a particular size and shape. 

One of these potters wrote on this rib:

The rib is inscribed: "Flower saucer / James Eardley / Bedson Eardley" and on the side, the date "June 18, 1864".  The last number is a bit messy and one could argue that it says nine and not four, but I think it is a four.

This is very cool.

I really like this object because it shows the kind of evidence that can only be taken from objects.  On June 8th, 1864, the Deseret News carried this announcement: "John, James, and Bedson Eardley dissolve their partnership; James and Bedson reform the Deseret Pottery; John forms ‘Sixth Ward Pottery’ with Amos Fielding as agent" (p. 292).

Ten days before this rib was made, three three Eardley brothers broke up the Desert Pottery and one of them set out on his own.  A few years after this, John accepted a mission in St. George and worked there for the rest of his life, along with kilns he operated in Beaver and Panguitch.  

I don't know if the brothers divisions were friendly or strained when they split up in 1864, but the fact that James and Bedson marked this rib with their names implies that this flowerpot design was shared between them, but was not John's.  It also implies that James and Bedson agreed upon this design when developing new products for the new incarnation of the Deseret Pottery.  I believe that also hints that consumers in Salt Lake City cared about the design of their flower pots and that people entering the Deseret Pottery noticed the different designs by James, John, and Bedson, and further distinguished them from other partners in the pottery or other clayworks in the city.

You'll just have to come see this little gem for yourself.

From Brampton to Parowan

I know that people who research family and Mormon history are keenly interested in emigration details, so I've posted the following part of the Davenports' story:

Thomas and Sarah moved with their children to the United States in November of 1849. They all presumably left from Liverpool on November 10, 1849 and arrived in New Orleans on December 24th, 1849. They traveled in the 45th company, aboard the Zetland, under the presidency of Elder Samuel H. Hawkins.

The Davenport family history recounts his trip up the Mississippi by transcribing Thomas's entries in his diary. The family went to St. Louis and then on to Council Bluffs, Iowa, arriving there on May 9th, 1850. They eventually moved to a farm in the Key Creek Branch where they spent about a year while they prepared to travel to Utah.

The Church immigration records say (according to family history) that the family left on June 20th, 1852, for Big Pigeon where they joined the 16th company led by Captain Uriah Curtis. They arrived in Salt Lake City on October 8th, 1852, and left for the Iron Mission pretty quickly thereafter, since they arrived in Parowan a few weeks later on November 4. They went south because community leaders had requested a potter from the Church's leaders.

For the purposes of our archaeological research, this part of the Davenports' story is interesting because there is no indication that Thomas and Sarah spent any time making pottery in Iowa or anywhere else in the United States. They did not have time to learn much about potting while traveling or living on the Mississippi River. Their potting skills brought them from Brampton to Parowan.

The Davenports in England

Over the next few days, I thought I would post some of the information I have gathered about the Davenports. I'll start at their beginnings-- births, marriage, and starting their family in England.

Thomas Davenport
born: April 1, 1815; parish of Brampton, County of Derby, England.
fifth child of Robert Davenport and Ann Jarvis Davenport

Sarah Burrows (Davenport)
born July 24th, 1811; parish Eckington, Derby, England.
fourth child of John Burrows and Charlotte Barber Burrows.

According to family histories, Thomas and Sarah married in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, in 1836. Their children were baptized at St. Thomas in New Brampton. According to online records at Genuki, Thomas and Sarah lived in Brampton Moor and Thomas was listed as "potter" and "working potter". The 1841 census lists them living in New Brampton, not Brampton Moor, and also lists Thomas as a "Pottery M" which some modern Davenport family researchers take to mean "pottery molder" but I think may just be "pottery maker".

According to the family history, these are the key events recorded in the records of the Latter-day Saints:
Thomas was baptized April 21, 1847 and Sarah two weeks later, June 8, 1847.
Thomas was ordained a teacher shortly after baptism and then ordained a priest on September 26th of that same year. The family history gives two dates when Thomas was ordained an elder: March 20th and April 27, 1848.

The Latter-day Saints changed branch designations through time as the membership expanded and contracted. March 20th, 1848, while Thomas was made an elder, he was also appointed as president of the Bolsover branch in Derbyshire. March 6, 1848, he became branch treasurer. In June of 1848, the Holdover and Warley branches were combined into a single unit and Thomas was appointed president of the newly combined branch. Through the rest of 1848, he was mentioned regularly in the records in relation to his missionary efforts both traveling and hosting visiting members. The family history says that the official Church records make no reference to his daily work.

Thomas and Sarah's children born in England before 1849:

William Davenport, b. May 28, 1837, bap. June 6, 1837, Brampton, Derby, England.
Thomas Davenport, b. April 7 1839, bap. May 5, 1839, Brampton, Derby, England.
Died February 16, 1840; buried St. Thomas Church, Brampton, Derby, England.
John Davenport, b. December 17, 1844, bap. January 1, 1845, Brampton, Derby, England.
Sarah Ann Davenport, b. February 14, 1847, bap. March 21, 1847, Brampton, Derby, England.

I'm working with a curator at the Chesterfield Museum, trying to learn more about where Thomas worked making pottery, what his jobs may have been, and if Sarah worked in a pot shop.

In my next post, I'll list the Davenport's immigration information.

Slide Show: Davenport Pottery Preview

I have posted some pictures that show why the Davenport Pottery Site is so interesting and exciting.  You can see the show using this public link on Facebook: (There is no need to join facebook to watch the slides).

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2004515&id=1010816510&l=2a5870b1ab

Society for Historical Archaeology Annual Meeting

I've just returned from the 2009 Annual Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology.  This year we met in Toronto, Canada, an historic and vibrant city.  The research reports and presentations that I heard inspired me, particularly those that explained other major efforts at community-based archaeological research.  I talked at length about the developing plans and partnerships in Utah, particularly about the Davenport dig and museum exhibit.  I'm already looking forward to the 2010 meeting next year-- not only because it is in Florida in January, rather than northern latitudes!

While on the plane, I had uninterrupted time to read.  As a result, I "checked-off" one of the items that had been high on my priority list.  I read Nancy J. Andersen's essay about Horace Ephraim Roberts, his family, and his pottery-making activities in Illinois, Iowa, and Utah.  Horace built the first operative pottery in the state, probably to the embarrassment of the Staffordshire potters that tried to get a factory operating in Salt Lake City.  Horace built his pottery in Provo and began selling ware in 1852, before anyone else was really successful at the business.  The other thing that makes Horace Ephraim Roberts among the most important potters in the history of Utah is that he was the head of what became the most significant "craft dynasty" in the region.  Horace married Harriet McEvers and they had many children who, along with Horace's male relatives and their children, became potters.  All in all, the Roberts family operated pottery shops in Provo, Logan, Mona, Vernal (near Naples), and Panguitch.  Horace married two other women, Mary Jane Bigelow and Jane Eliza Graves, but neither of the two children born from those marriages (by Jane Eliza) went into the pottery business.

Perhaps we'll get to do some survey at the site of Utah's first operative pottery this spring, before we get down to business at the Davenport site in Parowan!

Gearing up for 2009!

Greetings!

This is the new official blog for the Utah Pottery Project's archaeological researchers.  My name is Timothy Scarlett and I am the project director.  I'm an Associate Professor in the Industrial Heritage and Archaeology program in the Department of Social Sciences at Michigan Technological University.  

The Utah Pottery Project is an informal confederation of scholars and researchers interested in the lives, works, and histories of Utah's 19th-century immigrant potters.  The pottery makers, including master potters and clay workers, mostly came to Utah as part of the immigration stream organized by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (often nicknamed "LDS" or "the Mormons"). I maintain a web site dedicated to the research project here:

http://www.ss.mtu.edu/faculty/scarlett/research/upp/upphome.htm

My colleagues, students, and I are preparing for a major archaeological excavation this summer.  We'll be digging at the site of the Davenport family pottery shop in Parowan, Utah.  Once the dig is underway, we'll be making daily posts about our discoveries, trials, and tribulations.  During the lead up to the excavation and associated public programing, I'll post details here as our plans evolve.  There is already some information online at the website above and on Facebook, where you can 'friend' if you search for "Utah PotteryProject".

During the summer of 2005, Christopher Merritt and I did a small dig at the site of the Frederick Petersen Pottery in Salt Lake City, Utah.  You can read the archive of that excavation blog here:

http://www.ss.mtu.edu/faculty/Scarlett/Research/UPP/Digging2005.htm

I am thrilled to have this blog up and running.  I'm also very excited for this summer's research and the discoveries we'll make!

Best regards,

Timothy James Scarlett