1. H. E. Comstock, The Pottery of the Shenandoah Valley Region (Winston-Salem, N.C.: The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, 1994), p. 373. 2. John Bell’s wife is referred to as Elizabeth A. L. Bell (in her obituary notice, Village Record, June 12, 1868, p. 2), as Mary Elisabeth Fry Bell (A. H. Rice and John Baer Stoudt, The Shenandoah Pottery [Strasburg, Va.: Shenandoah Publishing House, 1929], p. 31), and Mary Elizabeth Fry Bell (H. E. Comstock, Pottery of the Shenandoah Valley Region, p. 369). 3. Rice and Stoudt, Shenandoah Pottery, p. 37; Waynesboro Record, January 24, 1901, p. 8. 4. Waynesboro Record, January 10, 1901. 5. Ibid. 6. Rice and Stoudt, Shenandoah Pottery, pp. 57, 59. 7. Ibid., p. 38. 8. This jar is illustrated in a recent stoneware auction; see American Pottery Auction, sale cat. (Clarence, N.Y.: Vicki and Bruce Waasdorp, March 21, 2004), lot 206. 9. This vessel is illustrated in a study of Pennsylvania stoneware with an assigned date of 1879; see Phil Schaltenbrand, Big Ware Turners: The History and Manufacture of Pennsylvania Stoneware (Bentleyville, Pa.: Westerwald Press, 2002), p. 48. However, the jar was made in 1874, a date given in its inscription and applied in cobalt on its shoulder and beneath one handle. This piece descended through three generations to its present owner, Dr. Robert Steiner of Waynesboro, and is on loan to the Renfrew Museum. 10. The auction of the contents of the Deardorff residence—called the “mystery house” by the auctioneer, L. J. Gilbert—received widespread attention for the sheer magnitude of the collection and the many rare examples it contained. Record Herald, May 27, 1935, p. 1. Approximately three hundred people attended the opening of the sale, which attracted dealers, “both professional and amateur,” from as far away as Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Record Herald, May 23, 1935, p. 1; Record Herald, May 24, 1935, p. 1. 11. Record Herald, May 27, 1935, p. 1. Although traditionally identified as a portrait of John Bell, it is possible that this likeness is of his son John William Bell, who managed the family pottery business after his father’s death, in 1880. This 1935 newspaper article notes that the portraits of John and Annie Bell “are at least forty years old,” a time frame that implies an association with John W. Bell and his death, in 1895. Also worth noting are two undated, unattributed newspaper clippings in the special collections of the Alexander Hamilton Memorial Free Library, Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. Each article features the same photograph, of a bearded man of advanced years identified as John W. Bell, who resembles the clean-shaven subject of Tillie’s portrait. The brief biographical sketches accompanying these photos, however, center not on John W. Bell but on his father, whose seldom-used middle initial is B. See H. E. Comstock, Pottery of the Shenandoah Valley Region, pp. 368–69. It is not unusual to encounter identity confusion when a father and son have very similar names and are in the same profession. An inadvertent interchange of these names is also found in the obituary notice for Tillie’s sister Henrietta, or Hettie, which referred to her parents as John William and Mary Elizabeth Bell (Daily Record and Blue Ridge Zephyr, November 10, 1916, p. 1).