With the completion of my two-volume, 1,300-page, ninth book drawing near, titled, America's Great Awakening and Migration: The Red Earthenware of Western New York, I recently began work on my tenth book, which I anticipate a 2026 publication date, titled, An Early Industry of Household Wares: The Red Earthenware of Salem Village, South Danvers and Peabody, Massachusetts. This book will focus on red earthenware production during the circa 1687-1860 period, although it will also touch upon some later production, as well as wares made elsewhere in coastal Massachusetts, including Colonial Charlestown and Bristol County.
As usual, the foundation of the book will be based on archaeology, and it will begin with artifacts collected before 1950 by Massachusetts author, Lura Woodside Watkins (1897-1982) at the site of the circa 1687-1709 James Kettle (1664/65-1712) Pottery in Salem Village (now Danvers), Massachusetts.
The Kettle Pottery is noted on a Map of Salem Village, 1692, where the business was located along the Frost Fish River for transportation. The archaeology that was collection at this site is owned today by the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., revealing crudely made pots and some slip decorated red earthenware. I have studied this material and some of the slip techniques are rather interesting!
I also want to emphasize that of all the material published in Watkins' book, Early New England Potters and Their Wares, the work she conducted with the James Kettle Pottery is in my opinion her most significant contribution, seeing that without her collecting these artifacts then none of this material would be available today, essentially one of the most significant businesses in Massachusetts would be lost to history forever.
Some of these artifacts can also be associated with red earthenware collected at the site of the foundation of the Salem Village parsonage, which was discovered by local Danvers historian Richard Trask and a team of archaeologists in 1970. This is also the location that sparked the Salem witch hysteria in 1692.
Interstingly, Kettle trained at a family red earthenware company in Charlestown before 1687, which was also connected with the state's first red earthenware business owned by the Drinker family in Charlestown. His son, Jonathan Kettle (1701-1763) established the first documented red earthenware business in South Danvers (Peabody) in 1731; a grandson was also employed in Goshen, Connecticut in 1776, which is a location known for Hervey Brooks' (1779-1873) production today: https://historicbeverly.net/product/a-city-on-the-river-the-early-red-earthenware-of-the-hartford-connecticut-area/.
Furthermore, among the artifacts collected by Watkins at the site of the James Kettle Pottery was a slip decorated red earthenware sherd attached to a kiln brick, whereas a similar yellow on black decoration was produced with various designs before the American Revolution in Charlestown in the 1700s (possibly in the late 1600s too). This is also a color combination produced on earthenware in Britain in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, which was the same time period that Kettle was in operation.
Note: For more reading about the colonial industry in Charlestown - see the third installment of my pottery book series, titled, The Dawn of Independence: The Death of An Industry: The Pottery of Charlestown, Massachusetts: https://historicbeverly.net/product/the-dawn-of-independence-the-death-of-an-industry/.
The 1687-1709 James Kettle Pottery in Salem Village (Danvers), Mass.
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