EarlyAmericanCeramics.com: Three Rare 19th Century Maine Red Earthenware Jars that are Privately Owned in New York Today

Thursday, March 15, 2018

Three Rare 19th Century Maine Red Earthenware Jars that are Privately Owned in New York Today

A nineteenth century red earthenware jar decorated with a lead glaze and the word "STARCH" stenciled in slip, attributed to the Dodge Pottery in Portland, Maine was illustrated in a feature story that I wrote for the February 2018 issue of Maine Antique Digest. These type of jars are known with two different type of decorations today; whereas, the second ornament incorporated the use of a marbled manganese glaze.

The inspiration for the jars stenciled with household ingredients may have materialized from a similar decorated form that was produced in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The exact number of ingredients used for these jars in Portland is unknown today, but it may have been as many as a dozen ingredients or more.

Interestingly, the manufacture of these jars are basically a match to another jar that I also illustrated in the Maine Antique Digest article, which had been stamped on the base "B DODGE / PORTLAND." The Dodge mark is extremely rare today with a few known objects bearing this emblem in museum collections, such as Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts and the Maine Historical Society. The impressed objects owned by the Maine Historical Society were also illustrated in the Maine Antique Digest article.

Nevertheless, there are a variety of the slip-decorated jars in existence today, which include two jars in the collection of the Maine State Museum, but there are also examples privately owned in Maine, Massachusetts, the midwest, among other locations.

However, I was surprised to learn about three more jars this afternoon that are privately owned in upstate New York. These jars were acquired years after they descended through a collector's family, who also reside in upstate New York. But there is no known history of the jars prior to this collection. Two of the jars are decorated with the same ingredients (see captions below) as are the jars owned by the Maine State Museum.

I believe the lids on these jars are likely original - the Dodge Pottery is known to have used individual numbered stamps on these type of jars to mark the base and the bottom of the lid. The number system was often implemented by potters to match a certain object to a specific lid after it had been fired in the kiln, since lids were usually loaded into the kiln in a separate location. This number system was also executed by utilitarian potters all over America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Note: The feature story, 'The Dodges and Their Potteries,' which was published in the February 2018 issue of Maine Antique Digest provides a much more in-depth analysis of the Dodge Pottery in Portland, Maine. But it also investigates related eighteenth and nineteenth century family owned-and-operated businesses in Exeter, New Hampshire and Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Collection of Rare Maine Red Earthenware Jars