Red Wing — Dakota Homeland and Stoneware Capital

The name on the map comes from a nineteenth-century Mdewakanton Dakota leader whose symbol of rank was a dyed swan's wing. He carried it into councils as a mark of authority, and the bluffs above this stretch of the Mississippi carried his name forward even after his people were pushed from the land.

Mdewakanton Dakota bands occupied the confluence of Hay Creek and the Mississippi for generations before European Americans arrived by steamboat in the eighteen forties and fifties. The federal government established a reservation here in eighteen eighty-nine, and though it was shrunk considerably over the following decades, the Prairie Island Indian Community today still holds land within the city limits, a rare survival of indigenous presence inside an American municipality.

What put Red Wing on the national map in a different way was clay. In eighteen sixty-one, a German immigrant potter named John Paul discovered large glacially deposited clay pits north of town. The clay was dense, fine-grained, and perfect for stoneware, the crocks, jugs, and butter churns that every American farmstead needed before refrigeration. The Red Wing Stoneware Company was incorporated in eighteen seventy-seven, and by eighteen ninety, its kilns were firing more stoneware than any plant in the nation.

Two more companies followed: Minnesota Stoneware in eighteen eighty and North Star Stoneware in eighteen ninety-two. Together they made Red Wing the undisputed stoneware capital of the American Midwest. Collectors today still chase the oval stamps and wing marks that identify pieces from these factories, salt-glazed crocks with cobalt-blue decorations that turn up at estate sales across the country.

For ninety years, from eighteen seventy-seven until nineteen sixty-seven, pottery shaped the local economy, the skyline of factory smokestacks, and the identity of a river town that had already survived the end of the logging era. The clay ran out, the markets shifted, and the last kilns closed, but the red-and-white stoneware that came out of these bluffs remains among the most collected American folk ceramics ever produced.