With my two-volume, 1,654-page, tenth book, heading to publication in the next month or so, titled, An Early Industry of Household Wares: The Red Earthenware of Salem Village, Danvers, Peabody, Beverly and Salem, Massachusetts, I wanted to take a look at the next book that I am working on now, which will feature great research from a group of scholars. This eleventh book is titled, A Monumental History: Stories of Red Earthenware Production in Western Massachusetts, the Berkshires and Vermont. I am really excited over this 600-700 page book that I hope will be published in the fall of 2026.
One of the subjects that will be covered in this book is the nineteenth century black glazed red earthenware teapots manufactured at the Thomas Crafts (1788-1831) Pottery in Whately, Massachusetts. The main source of information for these teapots is the archaeology collected by Massachusetts author Lura Woodside Watkins (1897-1982), now kept at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
The new book also takes a deeper look at this production by comparing possibly related examples recovered from various archaeological contexts in Boston, Salem, Massachusetts, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Yarmouth, Maine, Vermont, New York City and Philadelphia, etc. There were also similar teapots made on Long Island in New York, as well as other locations in the American Northeast that will be illustrated in the book.
Nonetheless, the nineteenth century black glazed red earthenware teapot remains shown below are from the Daniel Shays (1747-1825) settlement site in Vermont, where Shays had relocated from Western Massachusetts in the late 1780s. Shays had previously led a rebellion and an armed uprising of farmers in Western Massachusetts (in places like Lee, etc.), who protested high taxes, debt, and economic hardship following the Revolutionary War. They blocked courts to prevent foreclosures, highlighting the weakness of the Articles of Confederation and helping prompt the U.S. Constitutional Convention.
The rebellion manifested as part of a broader movement in Berkshire County to forcibly shut down courts and stop debt-related property foreclosures. Protesters, known as Regulators, closed the Berkshire County Court to prevent judges from ruling against debt-ridden farmers. Locally, the movement was supported by prominent figures like Chief Justice William Whiting (1730-1792), who publicly argued that the state's wealthy elite were exploiting impoverished farmers.
According to archaeologists from the Shays Settlement Project in Vermont, "The archaeology of this site is the first formal archaeological study of the ruins of a fortified eighteenth century settlement located in the mountains of Southern Vermont. The settlement was founded by Captain Daniel Shays and his fellow refugees who fled Massachusetts following the uprising he commanded there in 1787.
Shays was a Revolutionary War soldier who fought in the Battles at Lexington and Concord in 1776, as well as a farmer, and probably best known for being one of the leaders in Shays' Rebellion, an uprising against controversial debt collection and tax policies in Massachusetts in 1786 and 1787.
Several hundred participants were eventually indicted on charges related to the rebellion, Shays being one of them, and he fled and hid in Vermont with many people involved in the uprising. But he was eventually pardoned and returned to Massachusetts in 1788. Afterwards, he moved to upstate New York, where he died in 1825.
Incredibly, the site of Shay's Settlement in Vermont lay hidden and untouched for over 200 years until its rediscovery in April 2013."
Note: I posted an article to this website in December 2025 that showed the remains of another nineteenth century black glazed red earthenware teapot found in a similar archaeological context in Washington County, Vermont: http://www.earlyamericanceramics.com/2025/12/a-quick-look-at-forthcoming-eleventh.html
19th C. Teapots Recovered at the Daniel Shays Settlement in Vermont
Please Stay Tuned...Much More to Come...
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