The historical context of the Bradford Pottery in Kingston, Massachusetts is comparable to that of the Symonds family in Salem, Massachusetts, which is best known today for the furniture they manufactured in the seventeenth century, such as an important chest selling later this month at Sotheby's in Manhattan: https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2026/important-americana-2/the-highly-important-symon-and-rebeckah-horne.
As I have previously mentioned - the Bradford family's eighteenth and nineteenth century red earthenware production in Kingston will be included in my forthcoming two-volume, 1,660-page, tenth book, titled, An Early Industry of Household Wares: The Red Earthenware of Salem Village, Danvers, Peabody, Beverly and Salem, Massachusetts: http://www.earlyamericanceramics.com/2026/01/update-on-new-book-forthcoming-two.html.
This is an excerpt from Chapter 12 in the forthcoming book, "...While Plymouth, Massachusetts did not have the deep-water port necessary to be a primary location for the large clipper ships that participated in the Massachusetts China Trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, its merchants were involved with a maritime economy, in some ways comparable to Marblehead, Massachusetts. It was places like Salem, Boston and New Bedford, Massachusetts that were the primary hubs for the state’s China Trade.
Nonetheless, by 1807, there were more than seventy vessels from Plymouth that were involved with foreign trade. Overall, though, Plymouth was self-sufficient through farming, fishing and regional trade.
There is some archaeological evidence of Chinese porcelain recovered from early nineteenth century contexts in the Plymouth area, although archaeological investigations in Plymouth County have primarily focused on seventeenth century colonial sites. The ceramic assemblage from these sites reveals imported European artifacts that were also found in sites in Salem, as well as the Boston area (i.e. Charlestown, etc.), such as seventeenth century northern Italian marbled slip decorated red earthenware (see Chapter 7 in Volume I of this book for more information), North Devon sgraffito decorated red earthenware, Staffordshire slip decorated earthenware, tin glaze earthenware, and Westerwald, German stoneware, among other ceramics found in pre-1775 contexts.
This imported pottery is also the types that would have been used in local homes alongside the eighteenth century red earthenware made by John Bradford (1732-1818) in Kingston. There is little evidence of it, but the early wares made by Bradford may have included slip decorated red earthenware, such as some these archaeological examples recovered from eighteenth century contexts in Plymouth. However, some of the contexts also predate Bradford, where these objects may be related to other coastal colonial Massachusetts potters..."
Slip Decorated Red Earthenware Recovered in Plymouth, Mass.
Also see a feature story I wrote for the May 2019 issue of Maine Antique Digest, titled, The Bradford Family Potteries in Massachusetts: http://www.earlyamericanceramics.com/2019/04/the-bradford-family-potteries-in.html.
Please Stay Tuned...Much More to Come...
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