The Peoria Pottery: Half a Million Flower Pots a Year

In eighteen fifty-nine, two men named Christopher Fenton and Decius Clark arrived in Peoria from Bennington, Vermont, where they had been working in the American ceramic industry. They had identified something in the landscape here that mattered to their trade: the clay deposits along the Illinois River were workable, coal was available for the kilns, and the river could move finished product to market efficiently. They established the American Pottery Company and began firing in June of eighteen sixty.

The Peoria Pottery Company, which succeeded it in eighteen sixty-four under the ownership of John Bryner and William Travis, was the version that lasted and thrived. In April of eighteen seventy-five, a local newspaper reported that the pottery was producing five hundred thousand flower pots, thirty-six thousand fruit jars, and one hundred thousand milk pans each year. Those are remarkable numbers for a single facility in a mid-sized American city.

The pottery's signature was a warm brown glaze that collectors later came to call Peoria glaze. The company also produced stoneware: churns, crocks, jugs, butter pots, cuspidors, water coolers. Utilitarian objects for everyday American households, made in Peoria and shipped along the Illinois River and by rail to buyers across the Midwest.

Lydia Moss Bradley became the pottery's principal owner after eighteen seventy-six. Under her stewardship, the company expanded into decorative lines, exhibiting at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in eighteen ninety-three. The pottery operated until nineteen oh two, when it closed after thirty-eight years of continuous production.

A few hundred pieces survive in museum collections. They are the kind of objects that were never meant to be preserved, only used, and so the ones that remain carry that accidental weight.