EarlyAmericanCeramics.com: A Rare Form: Likely, A New England-Made Red Earthenware Foot Warmer from the 1800's

Thursday, April 9, 2015

A Rare Form: Likely, A New England-Made Red Earthenware Foot Warmer from the 1800's

I've heard dealers, collectors and so-on say that if you've never seen it before - and, if it looks 'right' then you should buy it. This idea definitely holds true in the American-made redware and stoneware world.

I generally view utilitarian pottery in three categories - 1) maker or place of manufacture, 2) form or skill and 3) color. Typically, if I am out looking and an object catches my eye introducing itself into any of the three aforementioned categories then I may have an interest in it and give the item a second look. Of course, rarity is a consideration, as well.

A little over a week ago, I was able to acquire this wonderful hand-thrown red earthenware foot warmer from a friend of mine, Mark Newton, who lives in Milford, New Hampshire. Mark told me he acquired it from a long-time picker and collector, who lives in Massachusetts. The form is also commonly referred to as a 'foot stove.' I have seen English stoneware foot warmers before. I have also seen turn of the twentieth-century New England-made stoneware foot warmers before; however, I have never seen an American-made red earthenware foot warmer until now. I also firmly believe that this foot warmer was made somewhere in New England - possibly, by a nineteenth-century Massachusetts potter.

According to the website, 'Home Things Past,' "Ceramic hot water bottles were common in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As well as filling hot water containers to warm your bed, you could buy earthenware bottles to use as foot warmers or hand warmers too. If you were traveling in cold weather you would hope to have a foot warmer of some kind in your unheated carriage, sleigh, or train compartment. In the 17th and 18th centuries a pierced metal carrier for hot coals was a common solution for anyone who could afford one. They went on being used in the 19th century, while other styles of foot warmers came along. As rail travel took off, foot warmers moved into trains. First class rail travelers in cool climates often supplied foot warmers."

It's nearly impossible (for me) to identify where this foot warmer was actually made; although, I feel it was made somewhere in Massachusetts in the mid-to-late-1800's.

A picture below shows that a side was exposed to a greenish-colored glaze, which may be the result of this bottle touching up against another object with this colored glaze - or, the potter may have accidentally managed to get a small amount of green glaze on the bottle some other way. The color of the green glaze is light, which doesn't really correspond with the typical green glazes that were applied in New Hampshire - but, it does match some green glazes used in parts of Maine and coastal Massachusetts.

Interestingly, the potter made the water bottle so it could lay on its back or stand up-right. It is a very-well made object that is reminiscent in form to some stoneware foot warmers made in the late-1800's and the early-twentieth-century in England - and, even at the Dorchester Pottery in Boston, Massachusetts around the turn of the twentieth-century.