EarlyAmericanCeramics.com: Carl Mehwaldt's 19th Century Red Earthenware Production and the Site of His Pottery in Bergholz, New York

Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Carl Mehwaldt's 19th Century Red Earthenware Production and the Site of His Pottery in Bergholz, New York

Last month, while vacationing in western New York with my nephew, Jason and niece, Alexis, we visited the Das Haus Museum in the Village of Bergholz next to Niagara Falls. Across the street from the museum is where Carl Mehwaldt (1808-1887) manufactured utilitarian red earthenware during the second half of the nineteenth century. We also visited The Buffalo History Museum in Buffalo where some of Mehwaldt's production is displayed in the exhibit, Neighbors: The People of Erie County, as well as The John R. Oishei Pioneer Gallery.

I have written a feature story about this experience and Mehwaldt's production that should be published later this year. The article recites some previously published first-hand accounts about Mehwald's production, but I also add a lot of new insight to the story, along with an important object that was not previously known until recently outside of a local family's history. It seems that the majority of what is known in publication about Mehwaldt today was written by Ada Walker Camehl for the Buffalo Historical Society in 1921, and again for the The Magazine Antiques in 1922.

According to the article, "Mehwaldt, a Pioneer American Potter" written by Camehl for the September 1922 issue of The Magazine Antiques, "In 1808, in Bruessow, a German village near Berlin, was born Carl 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."

Carl Mehwaldt's Pottery in Bergholz, New York