Footnotes

1. Walter Hough, “An Early West Virginia Pottery,” in Report of the National Museum (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1901), pp. 513–22.
2. James Thompson took the oath of loyalty in 1776, at age sixteen, in Harford County, Maryland. George Washington mentions visiting Hanway’s surveying office at Pierponts (just east of Morgantown) in 1784 while looking for possible routes for a canal to connect the Potomac to the Monongahela River.
3. The early Morgantown potters faced local competition for their well-to-do customers in the form of Ralph Berkshire’s 1806 advertisement for “china” wares. See James M. Callahan, History on the Making of Morgantown, West Virginia (Morgantown, W.V.: West Virginia University Studies in History, 1926), p. 136. Berkshire also sought some of Jacob Foulk Jr.’s wares to resell (see note 8 below), but had to go to court in 1809 in an attempt to obtain the wares due to him. By 1806 Berkshire owned both halves of Lot 7, having bought the kiln portion from John Scott in 1803. Perhaps Foulk had an unrecorded lease arrangement for use of this kiln and was to pay in crockery ware rather than money. The first steamboat reached the wharf in Morgantown in April 1826 but service would have been seasonal. See Samuel T. Wiley, History of Monongalia County, West Virginia: From Its First Settlements to the Present Time . . . (Kingwood, W.V.: Preston Publishing Company, 1883), p. 541.
4. Diana Stradling and J. Garrison Stradling, “American Queensware: The Louisville Experience, 1829–1837,” in Ceramics in America, edited by Robert Hunter (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 2001): 165–66.
5. Hough, “Early West Virginia Pottery,” p. 513; H. E. Comstock, Pottery of the Shenandoah Valley Region (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, 1994), p. 13.
6. Earthenware potters were working in nearby Pennsylvania, particularly in northern Fayette County, by 1791. The term “potter” had another definition in the eighteenth century, “a maker of metal pots,” hence it may refer to laborers working in the iron foundries springing up locally. This confounds the records. The following are believed to be late-eighteenth-century earthenware potters: Christian Tarr, 1791, Uniontown, who also built a pottery in Waynesburg that was operated in 1799 by Nicholas Hager (see James Hadden, A History of Uniontown: The County Seat of Fayette County, Pennsylvania [Akron, Ohio: New Werner Company, 1913], p. 808); Edward Bittle, 1794–1800, Cumberland Township, Greene County; Henry Tarr, 1794–1811, Washington; John Bower, 1795–1828, Frederick Town; Jacob Webb, 1797, Bridgeport (South Brownsville), Fayette County; and John Baners, who in 1798 paid for milling at Heaton’s mill, near Carmichaels, with earthenware (see Helen Elizabeth Vogt, Westward of Ye Laurall Hills, 1750–1850 [Parsons, W.V.: McClain Printing Company, 1976], p. 363). There was also an Adam Funk potter/pottery merchant, 1785–1800, in Pittsburgh. Data without citation sources are from James B. Whisker, Pennsylvania Potters: 1660–1900 (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993), which refutes Hough’s conjecture that Morgantown had the first pottery west of the Appalachian Mountains.
7. Callahan, Making of Morgantown, p. 130.
8. Of the principal candidates for “first potter,” only John Scott’s name appears before 1801. He was on the 1786 Taxables List residing with Patrick Johnson. The years 1788 to 1800 are missing, but the 1801 list includes Francis Billingsley, who acquired Lot 7 in 1814 and conveyed it to John W. Thompson in 1827. Jacob Foulk Jr. was in Morgantown in 1801 and purchased Lot 90, which is described as “Foulk’s Pottery on the S.W. corner of Front St. and Bumbo Lane.” The “appurtenances” on Lot 90 are not named in the deed to Foulk. The deed from John and Nicey Evans was made out to Nicholas Madeira but his name is crossed out and Foulk’s name written in above it. This is the same lot on which Foulk would oVer to build a brick house for Nicholas Madeira. After several suits and countersuits Foulk sold it to Christian Madeira in 1806—the same year that Berkshire bought Lot 7. For a fuller account of his tangled transactions with the Madeira brothers, see Comstock, Pottery of the Shenandoah Valley Region, pp. 405–6.
The most accessible chronology of deeds to Morgantown lots is contained in the appendix of Callahan’s Making of Morgantown. This is the source of all subsequent references to lots.
9. Callahan, Making of Morgantown, p. 309.
10. Hough, “Early West Virginia Pottery,” p. 515.
11. Ibid., pp. 514–15.
12. Ibid., p. 515.
13. Comstock, Pottery of the Shenandoah Valley Region, p. 404.
14. Lot 112, the “vacant brick kiln lot,” is on the southeast corner of High and North Boundary Streets, not far from Lot 90. However, Foulk may have used a pottery kiln for firing bricks.
15. Hough, “Early West Virginia Pottery,” pp. 414–15.
16. Wiley (History of Monongalia County, p. 260) states that Foulk had a pottery on Lot 90, which he owned until 1806. The clearest evidence is Foulk’s oVer of his house in Morgantown—“where he had his pottery kiln”—as security to William Tingle, who was assisting Foulk in the acquisition of land on the Cheat River. We do not know whether Foulk was able to use the kiln after the sale of Lot 90 to Christian Madeira. He may have made an unrecorded arrangement with Ralph Berkshire to use the pottery on Lot 7.
17. Ibid., pp. 579, 586; Callahan, Making of Morgantown, p. 121.
18. Wiley, History of Monongalia County, pp. 39, 669.
19. Comstock, Pottery of the Shenandoah Valley Region, p. 406.
20. A comparison of early Morgantown sherds with those on display in the Hagar House Museum in Hagerstown, Maryland, reveals very little similarity and casts doubt on suggestions that Foulk trained in Hagerstown. There is a closer relationship to Shepherdstown sherds formally owned by Mr. J. Wimer. Shepherdstown lies in the northeast corner of Jefferson County, West Virginia, formerly Frederick County, Virginia, where his name appears in court records.
21. There is a large green inkwell (not shown) that is signed John W. Thompson, but its green glaze is less bright than the green seen in the pieces attributed to Foulk.
22. Callahan, Making of Morgantown, p. 130.
23. Billingsley also may have started a pottery on Mrs. Kelly’s lot, probably Lot 12, and later sold it to John W. Thompson, perhaps in 1824. However, Thompson’s only known purchase within this time frame was Lot 7.
24. Hough, “Early West Virginia Pottery,” p. 513.
25. Glen A. Thompson, <glent@gte.net>, March 16, 1999, entry s-1.
26. Hough, “Early West Virginia Pottery,” p. 513.
27. Earl L. Core (The Monongalia Story: A Bicentennial History, 5 vols. [Parsons, W.V.: McClain Printing Company, 1974–1984], 3: 311–12) implies that John W.’s tailor shop was successful, but his turn to potting casts doubts on this.
28. Callahan, Making of Morgantown, p. 360.
29. Wiley, History of Monongalia County, p. 580.
30. Callahan (Making of Morgantown, p. 130n) placed the fire in 1830.
31. Wiley, History of Monongalia County, p. 260.
32. Core (Monongalia Story, 3:51) states that John W. operated the pottery until 1853, when his son, Capt. James Thompson, “came into possession [and] afterwards attached steam to it. . . .” The potter’s steam engine was only 5 hp; 1870 Industrial Census.
33. There were three other residents: Charlotte (Webb) Sears, Dorcas S. Thompson, and twelve-year-old Henry C. Madeira, who may have been an apprentice. Dorcas Thompson Haymond would later donate many of the pottery’s remaining tools to the National Museum. When the Thompson home burned in 1909, any remaining ledgers and correspondence were lost. The portraits were virtually all that was rescued.
34. See Hough, “Early West Virginia Pottery,” pl. 1, fig. 5, and pl. 5, fig. 1, respectively.
35. Ibid., pl. 5, fig. 3.
36. The authors would welcome photos of his Ohio products for a planned article on Morgantown’s stoneware era.
37. Wiley, History of Monongalia County, pp. 467, 468; Core, Monongalia Story, 3: 405.
38. George H. Thurston, Directory of the Monongahela and Youghiogheny Valleys: Containing Brief Historical Sketches of the Various Towns Located on Them . . . (Pittsburgh, Pa.: A. A. Anderson, 1859).
39. Wiley, History of Monongalia County, p. 579. One reference calls it a corn mill. However, corn originally was defined as the principal grain of a region, and in this case the principal grain was wheat. Wiley calls it the first flouring mill in the borough limits and states that Col. Francis Thompson had installed a 56-hp steam engine in 1873.
40. Whisker, Pennsylvania Potters, p. 83.
41. Monongalia Cemetery Readings, Dille collection, West Virginia Regional History Collection, Morgantown.
42. Hough, “Early West Virginia Pottery,” p. 516.
43. Ibid., p. 2, fig. 2.
44. Wiley, History of Monongalia County, p. 260.
45. See Phil Schaltenbrand, Stoneware of Southwestern Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), pp. 11, 12; and Phil Schaltenbrand, personal communication, September 2003.