An Interesting Perspective Given to the History - And, the Adaptation of American-Made Face Jugs from Southern Potters in the 1800's

This Afternoon, I was reading a book that was published in 2007 by the University Press of Mississippi - and, I thought this citation about the author's notion (and opinion) given to the origin of American-made southern face jugs in the 1800's was fascinating. The book focuses on the history of southern folk culture with an interesting study of how the face jug was first introduced to America. The author, also, discusses the connection that the Meaders family of potters in Georgia in the twentieth-century carries with this idea today, a family, who is also famous for their own brand of face jugs.

According to a book written by author, John A. Burrison, 'Roots of a Region: Southern Folk Culture, "Since they work in such a malleable medium day-in and day-out, it is not surprising that potters the world over have seen their clay as a kind of mirror and accepted its challenge to model a human likeness on a pot, pushing utilitarian craft into plastic art. The anthropomorphizing is stronger in some clay-working societies than others; in England, for example, it surfaced several times, first with Romano-British burial urns, then medieval "face-on-front jugs," and finally Toby "jugs" of late-eighteenth-century Staffordshire (England) that initiated an industrial tradition of slip-cast character mugs continuing to this day. It is my belief, though, that England was not the source for the (American) South's face-jug traditions.

In reviewing what is known of those traditions (today), three points should be made by way of introduction. First, although many humanoid vessels made in the United States are indeed jugs, some take the form of pitchers, cups, jars, and bottles. Second, not all depict just faces or heads; some are full figures. Third, Native Americans of the South made humanoid effigy pots during the Mississippi era (A.D. 800-1540), (which was) too early to have influenced the southern face jugs discussed here.

As with other adaptations of the jug form in the United States, face vessels -- as both a historical and a living tradition -- have been concentrated in the south. However, the oldest known Euro-American examples are from the early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia workshop of Henry Remmey, Jr., whose great grandfather, stoneware potter John Remmey, immigrated to Manhattan (New York City) from the Rhineland (Germany) in the 1730s. John would have been familiar with gray bearded jugs still being made in Germany, and if he made them in New York and passed the concept to his descendants, then Remmey face vessels are Americanizations of the German tradition.

Mid-19th Century Stoneware Harvest Face Jug - Philadelphia, PA

Attributed to Henry Harrison or Richard Clinton Remmey

Circa 1855-1865

Stands 7 1/2" Tall

Link to Auction Listing

Photo Courtesy: Crocker Farm - Sparks, MD

A substantial group (but not limited to) of early southern face vessels were made between 1863 and 1865 by enslaved African American potters at Colonel Thomas Davies' Palmetto Fire Brick Works in Bath, in the Old Edgefield District of South Carolina. The pieces are distinguished by bulging eyes and bared teeth of kaolin inset into the stoneware clay body, and the iron-rich mineral that darkened the alkaline glaze on some, along with the wax resist used to keep the glaze off the white eyes and teeth to maximize contrast, leave little doubt they were made to represent their maker's race. Pioneer ceramics historian Edwin Atlee Barber, after corresponding with Davies, was the first to discuss them in print in 1909. 'These curious objects possess considerable interest in representing the art of the southern negroes. The modeling reveals a trace of aboriginal art as formerly practiced by their ancestors in the Dark Continent.' Nothing was said, however, of the maker's motivations. Sixty years later, Yale University art historian Robert Farris Thompson advanced Barber's suggestion of African origins, arguing that later white-face jug makers such as Cheever Meaders (Georgia, 1887-1867) appropriated the 'Afro-Carolinian' tradition.

19th Century Stoneware Face Jug Attributed to Bath (Aiken County), SC

Circa Early 1860's

Stands 4 1/2" Tall

Link to Auction Listing

Photo Courtesy: Skinner, Inc. - Boston & Marlborough, MA

If American face jugs were not invented independently and had Old World roots, then I see Africa and Germany as the two most likely possibilities. Anthropomorphic clay vessels were indeed made in West Africa, perhaps early enough for the slave era. The Yunger of Nigeria, for example, made portrait pots called wiiso to honor ancestral spirits at shrines, and the Mambila of Cameroon made similar figural vessels. The angry expressions of some Afro-Carolinian face vessels, which could be interpreted as a nonverbal protest against enslavement, and a few tantalizing hints that these vessels may have been used in magic-religious or mortuary practices, at least suggest that they had a meaning distinct from the face jugs made by whites. This begs the question of whether white potters in the south made face vessels as early as the slave-made ones.

In 1995, a piece in a private collection surfaced that answers that question. It was decorated with an ash-glazed happy face jug with a monkey form, it was stamped 'CHANDLER MAKER,' the mark of Thomas Chandler, a white potter who worked in the Edgefield District from 1838 to 1852. Dating to about 1850, it preceded the slave-made face vessels  from the Davies workshop by about a decade. Before moving to South Carolina, Virginia-born Chandler is thought to have worked as a potter in New York State; it is remotely possible that in his northern sojourn he learned from one of the face vessels made by one of the Remmeys. Did Chandler then introduce the concept to Edgefield slave potters, or were they working in a separate, perhaps African-based tradition? At any rate, we now know that the face jugs of Cheever (Georgian, 1887-1967) and Lanier Meaders (Georgian, 1917-1998) were part of a continuous Anglo-southern tradition, but whether ultimately inspired by slave made examples, as has been suggested in the past, may never be learned."

20th Century Lanier Meaders Stoneware Face Jug - Cleveland, Georgia Origin

Stands 10" Tall

Link to the Auction Listing

Photo Courtesy: Crocker Farm - Sparks, MD

These next two photos show some of the examples of southern stoneware face jugs that the Smithsonian owns in Washington, D.C. A number of makers are represented here from the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries.

 19th/20th Century Southern Stoneware Face Jugs From a Variety of Makers

Photo Courtesy: The National Museum of American History, The Smithsonian - Washington, D.C.

19th/20th Century Southern Stoneware Face Jugs From a Variety of Makers

Photo Courtesy: The National Museum of American History, The Smithsonian - Washington, D.C.

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