EarlyAmericanCeramics.com: Some Upcoming Museum Presentations, Forthcoming Book, the Gleason Family Pottery of Western New York, Etc.

Tuesday, September 16, 2025

Some Upcoming Museum Presentations, Forthcoming Book, the Gleason Family Pottery of Western New York, Etc.

I will be speaking about my book series at some museums in New England and New York later this year and in 2026, where one of the speaking engagements will be done privately in a few months at the annual meeting of the New Hampshire Antique Dealers Association in Concord, New Hampshire. I put together a brief overview of this talk, although I wanted to share this information because there is a significant connection found with a family of potters in Western New York that is tied in with many of the key points that I will talk about, as part of the presentation. This family of potters is also a subject touched upon in my forthcoming two-volume, tenth book, titled, An Early Industry of Household Wares: The Red Earthenware of Salem Village, South Danvers, Peabody and Salem, Massachusetts.

This is the overview: "Red earthenware (or redware) production in the American Northeast, dates back to the seventeenth century, where it was the earliest type of domestic pottery production, with stoneware following in the eighteenth century before the American Revolution in places like New York City, Philadelphia, Yorktown, Virginia and Charlestown, Massachusetts. The household uses for each type of pottery were often similar, but the type of clay used and how it was fired in the kiln was different. Essentially, potters usually worked with the clays that were native to the areas that they lived, which typically dictated the type of pottery that was produced.

The earliest industry in New England operated in Charlestown in the seventeenth and eighteenth century before it was destroyed at the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775. This was an influential production center that employed dozens of potters and largely produced red earthenware, which was shipped throughout the eastern seaboard with archaeological evidence of such distribution recovered as far north as the Fortress of Louisbourg in Nova Scotia, Canada and as far south as the Carolinas, with many locations in between.

Another movement that happened in New England was the rise of the Quaker religion, which first arrived from England to Salem, Massachusetts in the 1650s; many of the Quaker families that lived in the Salem and Danvers area embraced the potter’s craft, with a number of multigenerational families working as potters in the area during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. This industry was also intertwined with production in Bristol County, Massachusetts, among other locations in New England, including the Colonial industry in Charlestown and parts of New Hampshire and Maine, etc.

In fact, one of the potters who came from the Danvers tradition was Peter Clark (1743-1826), whose grandfather, Reverend Peter Clark (1693-1768) was the minister of the Salem Village Parsonage from 1717-1768, which was the location of the infamous Salem Witch Trials in 1692. Clark became a significant potter, working to the south of Boston in the 1760s and part of the 1770s, before relocating to New Hampshire, where he and his family were influential with production in the Hartford, Connecticut area, throughout New Hampshire and Vermont.

Some of these potters in northern New England and coastal Massachusetts also became factors in parts of New York in the 1800s, including Western New York, which was a migration area for potters from New England and the Mid-Atlantic region. Many of these potters were employed in multiple professions, working as farmers in the warmer months, while producing red earthenware when it was colder, a career path for a number of potters in America in the eighteenth and nineteenth century."

Interestingly, the Gleason family came to Western New York from Cheshire County, New Hampshire, where I noted in the recently published Western New York book, titled, America's Great Awakening and Migration: The Red Earthenware of Western New York: "The Gleason family’s history can be traced back to Middlesex County, Massachusetts in the early-eighteenth century, which is when Thomas Gleason, IV (1637-1705) migrated from England to the Boston area. The family remained in this area, until Benjamin Gleason (1749-1814) relocated to Cheshire County, New Hampshire in the late eighteenth century; Benjamin was the father of Fortunatus Gleason Senior (1752-1811), who was the father of Forunatus Gleason Junior (1792-1873), who originally established the pottery business in Morganville. Some of the Gleason family from New Hampshire also traveled to southern California in the 1800s."

An interesting connection that the Gleason family had in Cheshire County was a member of the Southwick family also worked there as a potter for decades in the 1800s, a descendant of Lawrence (1600-1660) and Cassandra Southwick (1598-1660), who were persecuted for their Quaker faith in Salem, Massachusetts in the seventeenth century.

The 19th Century Gleason Family Pottery of Western New York