EarlyAmericanCeramics.com: New Discovery: A Previously Unidentified Surviving Example of William Pecker's Stoneware Production from Merrimacport, Mass.

Sunday, October 21, 2018

New Discovery: A Previously Unidentified Surviving Example of William Pecker's Stoneware Production from Merrimacport, Mass.

Last Sunday, I posted an article about some of the red earthenware and stoneware remains that I found with my niece Alexis at the site of William Pecker's (1758-1820) circa 1790-1820 pottery in Merrimacport (formerly West Amesbury), Massachusetts. Among those artifacts was the top of a stoneware jug with some cobalt blue decoration and impressed with a two-gallon capacity mark. This artifact perfectly matched a two-gallon Pecker stoneware jug in my collection that was found a few years ago during a house clean-out of an old home in Wenham, Massachusetts.

Because of this artifact and capacity mark, New York state collector and researcher Jude Hanley was able to identify a jug owned privately in Maine as a previously unknown surviving example of Pecker's stoneware production, which is extremely rare to find today. The owner of that jug, collector and researcher Toby Ramirez then determined that the impressed flower found on the jug matched a flower known from Pecker's production; this style of flower has been previously published in a feature story I wrote about Pecker's stoneware production for the August 2015 edition of the New England Antiques Journal entitled, William Pecker: A Forgotten Stoneware Potter from Merrimacport, Mass., as well as an article published in the 2004 edition of Ceramics in America.

Nevertheless, it is also interesting to note that recent history (before it was owned privately in Maine) has previously identified this jug as an object made by the Crolius family in New York City. While there may be similarities found with this object and stoneware manufactured in Manhattan, this jug is in fact one of only a small group of surviving stoneware objects known from the Pecker Pottery in Merrimacport today.

My Niece Alexis with the William Pecker Pottery Stoneware Jug