EarlyAmericanCeramics.com: Charles A. Mehwaldt: An Important 19th Century Potter From the Niagara Falls Region in New York

Monday, August 29, 2016

Charles A. Mehwaldt: An Important 19th Century Potter From the Niagara Falls Region in New York

According to an article written by Ada Walker Camehl in September 1922 for The Magazine Antiques, titled, Mehwaldt, a Pioneer American Potter,'"In 1808, in Bruessow, a German village near Berlin, was born Charles August Mehwaldt. He came from a line of potters; for his father and his grandfather before him had spent their lives at the potter's wheel. After he had learned the trade, young Mehwaldt, as was the custom of the country, passed several years as a journeyman potter in search of experience taking him to Russia and into the Holy Land. On his return to his home, he found the country in a state of political unrest. Greater liberties were being demanded by the people while free America, beckoning across the sea with an alluring hand, was welcoming many citizens of all classes to voluntary exile.

In 1844, a man of wealth, Williams by name, gathered together several families from the neighborhood of Bruessow and brought the little band to the United States. They purchased a piece of land in western New York, on the Niagara frontier, cleared the timber and built a hamlet of log houses.

Fired by the glowing accounts which came back to the Fatherland from this transplanted colony, a second company came together, in 1851, to follow the first. Among this group were the potter Mehwaldt, his wife and their five children.

Mehwaldt bought a log house, two acres of land and set up his pot works in Bergholtz, New York. His outfit was of the most primitive description: a small brick oven in his back yard for firing the clay, and a wooden kick wheel. These, with his hands and his Old-World training, were all his capital, and here he worked alone at his trade until he died in 1887.

As the Civil War drew near, Mehwaldt's sons were swept away with enthusiasm for their adopted country. Finally, the three boys ran away, and enlisted in the northern army. Two of them met death on southern battlefields. As a memorial to his dead soldier boys, the potter made two wreaths of clay flowers to hang upon the walls of the local church. With them hung the photographs and the war records of his boys.

Mehwaldt produced quantities of chimney crocks, red earthenware crocks of all sizes, butter-crocks with handles to be hung in wells to keep butter cool; cooking utensils, candlesticks, all manners of tableware - platters, plates, sauce-dishes, cups and saucers, mugs, pitchers, sugar bowls, vegetable dishes, teapots and teakettles. He also produced finer products like inkstands and tile stoves.

At Christmas-time, he usually turned out many little dinner-sets for children, and toys made in the form of pigs, owls, roosters, and birds with whistles in their tails."

Earlier this year, I visited a prominent longtime red earthenware collection in Western New York, which included a number of examples of pottery made by Charles A. Mehwaldt. I learned that Mehwaldt often inscribed objects with a number on the base, but he also inscribed jars on the body (see example below). However, this is not a style that is exclusive to Mehwaldt, seeing that I have seen potters in New England also use this technique.

Below I have shown a collection of pottery that is attributed to Mehwaldt, which is owned by the New York State Museum in Albany, New York. Unquestionably, I have seen similar objects, which are sometimes attributed to Pennsylvania today. Although, I could also see this type of red earthenware attributed to Ontario since it is expected that some of Mehwaldt's work must have crossed the American-Canadian border in the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries.

Charles Mehwaldt Attributed Pottery Owned by the New York State Museum