Ohio Valley Pottery Towns

Ohio Valley Pottery Towns PDF

Author: Pamela Lee Gray

Publisher: Arcadia Library Editions

Published: 2002-11

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 9781531613846

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The Land Act of 1796 opened the gates for a flood of settlers into the lands of the Upper Ohio River Valley. The natural clay soils of the valley, coupled with an abundance of salt for glazing and the Ohio River as a nearby source for transportation, laid the foundation for what would become the pottery capital of the United States. Naming their new towns for those they left behind-Liverpool, Chester, Newell-English and Irish entrepreneurs established factories for making crockery. The industry boomed and, by the turn of the twentieth century, Ohio Valley pottery was being exported throughout the world. The story of pottery production is more than a list of manufacturers; the towns that grew around these factories and the lifestyles of the people who worked in them provide the social fabric of the Ohio Valley. From the early pioneer villages of the "hand-thrown" period to the towns with bustling shops and regular trolley service, residents built homes, schools, and churches, creating thriving communities.

Ceramic, Art and Civilisation

Ceramic, Art and Civilisation PDF

Author: Paul Greenhalgh

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-12-24

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 1474239722

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In his major new history, Paul Greenhalgh tells the story of ceramics as a story of human civilisation, from the Ancient Greeks to the present day. As a core craft technology, pottery has underpinned domesticity, business, religion, recreation, architecture, and art for millennia. Indeed, the history of ceramics parallels the development of human society. This fascinating and very human history traces the story of ceramic art and industry from the Ancient Greeks to the Romans and the medieval world; Islamic ceramic cultures and their influence on the Italian Renaissance; Chinese and European porcelain production; modernity and Art Nouveau; the rise of the studio potter, Art Deco, International Style and Mid-Century Modern, and finally, the contemporary explosion of ceramic making and the postmodern potter. Interwoven in this journey through time and place is the story of the pots themselves, the culture of the ceramics, and their character and meaning. Ceramics have had a presence in virtually every country and historical period, and have worked as a commodity servicing every social class. They are omnipresent: a ubiquitous art. Ceramic culture is a clear, unique, definable thing, and has an internal logic that holds it together through millennia. Hence ceramics is the most peculiar and extraordinary of all the arts. At once cheap, expensive, elite, plebeian, high-tech, low-tech, exotic, eccentric, comic, tragic, spiritual, and secular, it has revealed itself to be as fluid as the mud it is made from. Ceramics are the very stuff of how civilized life was, and is, led. This then is the story of human society's most surprising core causes and effects.