Utah Pottery Project Web Site

The members of the Utah Pottery Project are studying the immigrant potters of Utah's nineteenth century.  We seek to gather into one place information about the potters, their families, their work, their products, and their contributions to the history of Utah. 

The Eardley brothers and their nephew, along with a map of Bedson Eardley's Deseret Pottery from 1898.

At least 100 working potters came to Utah in the Nineteenth Century and opened shops or worked in the business.   Most of the potters immigrated to the territory after joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS, the Mormons).  The currently identified sites include 45 potteries in 26 cities and towns throughout the Mormon Domain-- connecting settlements in Utah to Hailey, Idaho; Brigham City, Arizona; and Virginia City, Nevada. 

The potters made all kinds of products: kitchen crockery and storage jars, tea pots and umbrella stands, drainage pipes and roofing tile, plates and piggy banks.

Each pottery became an important symbol in its community. Children visited the potters after school, people came to dances during the dramatic kiln firings, and everyone certainly knew when new pots were available for sale.  Almost every pottery identified in nineteenth-century Utah was found in a Mormon community.  Given the emphasis placed upon landed self-sufficiency in Latter-day Saint theology, the potteries became symbols of permanence through their association with agriculture.  The potters made the jars into which residents put up preserves.  Pottery making even became an important metaphor in extemporaneous religious sermons.

The project goals are listed below.  We hope you find something interesting in the site.  If so, please drop us a line and let us know.  We've learned a whole lot about  some of the potters, but many left scant records of their lives.  We love contributions of information- send us along references, pictures, documents, and stories.  Copies of diaries, account books, photographs, receipts, and other family scrapbook contributions are a tremendous help to our research!

Of course, financial gifts go directly to support the archaeological research efforts- mostly in the form of student scholarships and direct project costs.

Enjoy the site!

Project Goals:

1. Catalog the immigrant pottery makers and clay industry workers of Utah's Nineteenth-Century.

We've cataloged nearly 100 individuals and add more whenever we can.  At this point, researchers have scanned every page of the United States census takers' books for the Utah Territory between 1850 and 1880.  We've only looked up particular individuals and communities for 1900-1930.  Researchers also read the business directories for the area, checking the indices and scanning every page for pottery makers.  Of course, we've also read lots of secondary histories looking for potters. 

We think we've found most of the major potteries and the leading potters.  Many hundreds more potters emigrated from England, Europe, and the Eastern USA but escaped the sources mentioned above.  Many came into the territory and settled as farmers or laborers.  We're still on the prowl, looking for new names to add to our list.

The complete catalog is here.

2. Locate and identify the archaeological sites from operating potteries. Since 1999, Tim Scarlett has been trying to locate the site of each known pottery.  Building on decades of exhaustive work by Kirk Henrichsen, and other previous studies by Cinda Baldwin, Nancy Richards, and Emma Cynthia Nielson, Tim has combed the early deed indices of many Utah towns.

When we are able to narrow down to about a city block, project researchers approach local landowners and request permission to conduct archaeological testing.  With landowner permission, we assess the archaeological integrity of each pottery site-- are there buried features from the pottery period, such as pits containing bits of broken kiln waste?  Are the features intact (in situ) or have they been plowed over, dug up, mixed or otherwise changed from when the potters them?

The Inventory of Utah Potters includes towns where archaeology survey has taken place.

3. Catalog known examples of Utah Pottery in museum collections.

Many museums hold collections of Pottery from Utah's Pioneer and Territorial eras.  Perhaps ten million pots circulated in the local economy during the nineteenth century, but only a precious few examples with very good provenance are now in museums.  We'd like to have a complete searchable database available on this site, but for now, you can see some examples here.

4. Academic Study

The potters lives are so very interesting because they are not typical "Mormon Pioneer Stories."  The potters lived very different lives.  Some followed diverse strategies to keep themselves working in the business while others changed their profession.  A few spent decades potting in Utah's cities and towns.  Others operated shops only for a year or two.  Some floated from shop to shop as workers throwing clay, while others had to stop working their wheels to become brick yard laborers.  The diverse stories tell us a great deal about Utah's territorial period and the transformations surrounding statehood and the new century.

In addition to studying each potter, potting family, or pottery as a place, we're also studying the clay industry.  We're examining the economics of potting, but since primary documents are rare, we are also using the archaeological sciences to reconstruct patterns of trade and exchange in ceramic commodities.

5. Make information available to everyone.

Utah's potters are of interest to a wide range of people, including researchers, descendents, educators, artists, archaeologists, and current community residents.  This web site will be the primary venue where people can trade and share information, pictures, and reflections on the potters' lives and their connections to both history and the modern world. 

We are also working on a major exhibit about the research project.  The exhibit will open to the public during the summer of 2009.  This will be the first of a series of exhibitions, some virtualon this site as well as "brick-and-mortar" traveling exhibits of Utah's pottery.  Watch this space for updates.

This research should not end up as mere reports on file at the Antiquities Office of the Utah Division of State History.  The documents and artifacts should be available to many people to study and appreciate.  One can learn a tremendous amount about history by bringing together the contents of a hundred different family scrapbooks.  The same is true of objects. 

This is a DRAFT page.  These linked pages provide examples of the resources that the UPP expects to produce for public use.  If you would like to support the creation/expansion of this site, please contact Timothy Scarlett at scarlett@mtu.edu or (906)487-2359.

Contact Details:

Utah Pottery Project

Timothy James Scarlett, Director

Department of Social Sciences

Michigan Technological University

1400 Townsend Ave

Houghton, MI 49931

Phone: (906)487-2359

Fax: (906)487-2468

email: scarlett@mtu.edu

Announcements:

We are developing plans for fieldwork during the spring and summer of 2009.  Stay Tuned!

Read the Blog about July 2005 excavations in Salt Lake City

Speakers are available to make presentations to your organization about this project.  Please contact Timothy Scarlett for more information.

Institutional Support:

Department of Social Sciences

Program in Industrial Heritage and Archaeology