Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/170

158 the present time engaged in burning magnesia for the drug trade.

About the time that Tucker first placed his new ware on the market a factory for the production of a somewhat similar commodity was erected at Jersey City, presumably by Frenchmen. Later, under the title of the American Pottery Company, cream-colored, white, Parian, and porcelain wares were made here. In 1843 an exhibit of embossed tea-ware, jugs, and spittoons was made by this company at the Franklin Institute, the specimens of Parian with blue ground and raised ornamentation in white being especially praiseworthy. After several changes in proprietorship the business passed into the hands of Messrs. Rouse & Turner in 1870, and the name of the factory was altered to the Jersey City Pottery. Mr. John Owen Rouse came from the Royal Derby Works about forty years ago. Mr. Turner died in 1884, leaving the former sole proprietor. The plant at present consists of four kilns, one of which has an interior diameter of nineteen and a half feet, and numerous large buildings for manufacturing and storage purposes. Here are now made large quantities of white granite ware in table and toilet services and decorative designs, a specialty of the factory being porous cups for telegraphic uses, of which fully five thousand are produced every week.

After the year 1840 the number of potteries in the United States multiplied rapidly. About that time Samuel Sturgis was making, in Lancaster County, Pa., in addition to earthen and stone ware, clay tobacco-pipe bowls, which he molded after the French designs in the form of human heads. These were glazed in yellow, green, and brown, and supplied largely to the tobacconists of eastern Pennsylvania. In 1843 there were one hundred and eighty-two potteries in that State alone, few of them, however, of any importance, whose aggregate productions amounted to $158,000. In 1800 there were only about eighty potteries in the same State, a falling off of more than half. This diminution in number does not by any means indicate a decadence of this industry, because the establishments of half a century ago were mostly scattered through the rural districts and were insignificant affairs, producing only the coarser and cheaper grades of crockery. Such potteries have almost entirely disappeared, while those of to-day manufacture, for the most part, the finer qualities of earthen, white granite, and porcelain wares. At the present time there are over five hundred potteries in the United States, not including architectural terra-cotta and tile works, of which some twenty-five are in Trenton, N. J., and about the same number in East Liverpool, Ohio.

An exhibit of Rockingham was made at the Franklin Institute in 1846 by Bennett & Brother, of Pittsburg, which was