DON CARPENTIER began to construct Eastfield Village in East Nassau, New York, when he was fourteen years old, dismantling late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century buildings within a fifty-mile radius of his father’s east field and reconstructing them on site. Don succumbed to the ravages of ALS in 2014 at age sixty-two. Before dying, he checked that all was well with the historic preservation workshops proceeding in different parts of his much-loved village. Eastfield Village continues to offer seasonal historic preservation workshops and seminars.
JONATHAN RICKARD, an art director and creative director in advertising, lives in Deep River, Connecticut. In 1972 he began to collect dipped wares—slip-decorated creamware and pearlware made in Britain from approximately 1770 through the nineteenth century.
IN 1989 A MUTUAL FRIEND introduced the authors by telephone. Eastfield Village was essentially complete and Don had decided that he wanted to start making dipped wares, fragments of which he kept finding in old house and tavern locations. Within months, Jonathan attended an archaeology conference at Winterthur and met Parks Canada archaeologist Lynne Sussman, who was researching and writing about dipped wares and with whom he’d corresponded.[1] He spent that evening showing slides of his collection to Lynne who, after seeing one particular image, remarked that she knew how that pattern was made, as Don had already made some. Don had taught himself to make lathe-turned earthenware pots the way they had been made in eighteenth-century Staffordshire factories.[2] Within weeks, she and Jonathan met Don at his home in Eastfield Village.
In 2006 Jonathan’s book Mocha and Related Dipped Wares, 1770-1939 was introduced at the New York Ceramics Fair. A month later, Don was again in Staffordshire, where he’d found a waster pit in a trench surrounding the empty parking lot of the closed Doulton factory in Burslem. It had been seven years since Jonathan had suffered sudden paralysis and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Despite his partial recovery, it was too difficult for him to travel with Don as they had done many times, making discoveries of various kinds throughout Great Britain. Don sent images of very distinctive dipped ware wasters that Jonathan was able to match with surviving pots in his collection. “I believe these are all by Wood & Caldwell. How far are you from the Fountain Place site?” Jonathan asked.
Don responded, “I’d say no more than a quarter mile up hill.” More e-mailed images provided additional connections, some outside Jonathan’s collection: wasters that looked like they were from archaeological punch bowls from Alexandria, Virginia; and archaeological examples of bowls and mugs from Strawbery Banke in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and from beneath the floorboards in an abandoned house not far from Eastfield Village.
On several other trips, Don dug in snow and mud. The trench had been dug with a backhoe to prevent transient groups, known as travelers, from setting up a campground. A chain-link fence added to the preservation along with a guard whom Don got to know. The guard put the backhoe to work, lifting more of the blacktop in order to give Don extended access. Further along the trench Don found clearly different wasters—some with Anthony Shaw’s maker’s mark dating to the 1860–1900 period. Concerned that his collecting of fragments be in compliance with local preservation protections, Don contacted David Barker, then senior archaeologist for the city of Stoke-on-Trent, to make sure his digging did not conflict with any city plans.
Shortly after Don returned from overseas, Jonathan’s pots and Don’s wasters were all spread out on the great granite slab that formed part of the entrance to the reconstructed 1840s meetinghouse at Eastfield. Only one of the surviving examples that Jonathan believed belonged to the group Don had unearthed—a one-pint mug (figs. 1-6)—was marked by an impressed Wood & Caldwell signature. In Don’s collection was a punch bowl, similarly impressed and with a complex engine-turned, multicolored pattern (figs. 7, 8).
Jonathan determined that Don’s wasters were from approximately 1795–1805 (figs. 9-41). Wood & Caldwell operated by that name from 1790 to 1818 during which Enoch Wood (1759–1840) was in partnership with James Caldwell, a financial partner who had no direct involvement with the manufacturing. Caldwell’s involvement set the firm solidly in the rapidly growing export business. On a subsequent visit to Burslem and the waster pit, Don found a penny dated 1799. His finds included more than dipped wares. There were examples of “debased” scratch blue stoneware vessels, painted pearlwares, children’s motto mugs, and pearlware jugs with brown-slip fields on which were painted fioral decoration (figs. 42-43).
In 1818, when Caldwell retired, Enoch Wood continued the business as Enoch Wood & Son, perhaps the most significant exporter of British earthenwares to North America, until the business closed in 1846. The Fountain Place Works was the largest pottery manufacturing facility in Burslem by far. Other Burslem manufacturers of earthenware were smaller, and few had the kind of financial stability to afford expensive engine-turning lathes. John and Richard Riley began their business in Burslem in 1796 and were involved to a lesser degree in export business. Ralph Wedgwood’s Burslem business was bankrupted by 1797. It’s unlikely that this Wedgwood ever employed an engine-turning lathe in his manufacture, although his output included vessels decorated with a veneer of colored clay particles known today as inlaid agate. Examples of that technique are among Don’s wasters. Roger Pomfret has reported that his knowledge of the Rileys’ operation shows no use of such an investment, besides which, as the Riley business grew until 1828, it did so after the most extensive use of engine-turning for decoration had passed, made obsolete by the time and expense necessary to operate such costly equipment during a period of intense competition as wholesale prices were shrinking.[3]
Nearly all of the wasters matching surviving pots in the Rickard collection utilized engine-turning as the major decorative element. Unlike most dipped wares in use in America at this period, these do not have colored glazes over rouletted bands nor do they have a variety of projecting molded base trim. While not all of the handle terminals are identical, most have a characteristic rococo appearance based on silver examples from that period. These design elements are what make the Wood & Caldwell mugs and jugs so distinctive.
A Wood & Caldwell invoice dated June 22, 1797, lists wares being “ship’d by Messrs Rathbone, Hughes & Duncan of Liverpool & consigned to Messrs Cuttler & Amory of Boston on the Account and Risque of Wood & Caldwell of Boston.”[4] Here we have Wood & Caldwell of Burslem sending crates and hogsheads of earthenware over land to Liverpool agents Rathbone, Hughes, and Duncan, who arranged shipping to Boston to agents Cuttler and Amory on behalf of the Boston office of Wood & Caldwell. This was a seriously large and well-funded manufacturing business making the emerging United States one of its principal markets. There is also evidence of the company’s shipping into other ports along the east coast, including Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Baltimore, Maryland.
Enoch was the son of Aaron Wood, the celebrated block cutter responsible for the molds used to create the outer edge designs for white salt-glazed stoneware plates and dishes. Aaron was the brother of Ralph Wood II, who used the impressed mark “Ra Wood / Burslem” on known examples of inlaid agate creamware. A look at the details—the handle terminals and pendants on snips (pouring lips) of these ca. 1800 wasters—shows the quality of these wares and the suggestion of the availability of precise, well-designed block molds. Over several generations the Wood family was intertwined, through business connections and marriage, with the Wedgwood family, adding yet another distinction to their business output.[5]
