A religious sect called Shakers, founded by a woman with the modest name Anne Lee, came to New York from England in the late 18th century. The group’s official name used after emigrating to America was “United Society of Believers in the Second Coming of Christ.” The name became “Shaker” because of the group’s ecstatic form of worship that involved shaking the body. Before they split off into a separate group, the Shakers were part of the larger Quaker community. Early Quaker worship was also characterized by shaking and trembling – hence their name.

Within 10 years of their arrival in the United States, Shakers became established at two sites in New Hamp-shire, one in Canterbury and the other in Enfield. Event-ually, there were 19 Shaker communities, extending into Ohio and Kentucky as well as the Northeast.
Key characteristics of Shaker communities were communal living in which property was shared, celibacy, simplicity in dress and in what the community produced by way of architecture and furnishings, and rural living apart from what they regarded as the potentially corrupting influences of city life. Male and female members of the group called one another “brother” and “sister.”

Obviously, a community cannot long survive in celibacy without some other effort to ensure the future of the community. Shakers were able to preserve the faith’s practice and survival for more than 150 years by actively recruiting converts and adopting children. The latter, once they reached the age of 21, were given the choice of staying in the Shaker community or leaving it. Over the lifetime of their communities, the Shakers raised hundreds of orphaned children. Today, there are left just a handful of Shakers still living their traditional lives, as they are able given their advanced age.

Shaker Craftsmanship

Shaker craftsmanship in stone buildings and in furnishings and utilitarian items made from wood is highly esteemed today. Their buildings, which were communal and, therefore, large, are still standing. Austerity was not what Shakers were after in what they created by hand. Their emphasis in hand-creation was on beauty allied with simplicity and basic functionality, with a complete lack of excess ornamentation but not devoid of pride in the workmanship.

Today, genuine examples of Shaker wooden items made for inside the home can be quite hard to find and expensive to acquire. They can also be challenging to identify as genuinely Shaker since modern artisans have imitated their style and production techniques.
Shaker wooden buckets and boxes used primarily for kitchen storage were made from rounded bentwood. During production, the wood was kept pliable for rounding by steaming it or by hot water immersion with the ends brought together in swallowtail joints secured with copper tacks (Rounded boxes with modern non-copper tacks can be one clue to modern imitation).

Many pottery and glass companies in the mid-20th century supplemented lines for which they were most famous with an occasional advertising item commissioned by another company. These items are especially valued by collectors with a personal affinity for the advertisement.

Advertising in kitchen ceramics

Those of you who have followed this column over the years would know that I have an extensive collection of Hull and McCoy Ivory Foam/Brown Drip pottery that I use in the kitchen, but I hadn’t previously noted the advertising items made in these sets. One of these is a complete Hull Brown Ivory Foam carafe set marked on the base as Crestone, a very slightly later version of Hull’s immensely popular line in this Brown Drip color that was made from the early 1960s through the 1980s. This version from the carafe and matching cup sports the crest for Green Mountain College (closed in 2019) in my state of Vermont. The complete unaffiliated version of the set can be seen in an advertising page reprinted on page 36 of the book Collector’s Guide to Hull Pottery; the Dinnerware Lines by Barbara Loveless Gick-Burke (Collector Books, 1993). The whole carafe set, especially as an advertising piece, can be considered rare.

Another advertising example is a mug with the advertiser’s name integrated into the clay. Although the item was not actually made by Myers, the bottom is marked “Imported and Bottled by Fred L. Myers and Son, Baltimore, MD, 80 proof.” The white clay rim on the base indicates the mug itself would have been made by an American company, probably either Hull or McCoy (Items made in Canada or Japan with a brown glaze have a red-brick-colored base rim).

I picked this up at an antique mall because rum is my own favorite (very occasional) celebratory beverage.

My third advertising item is a Hull coffee cup with the white crest logo for my undergrad alma mater, the University of New Hampshire (still going strong after 100 years). Its base is simply marked “hull [small h and name in block print], Oven Proof USA [in cursive].” (Hull Ivory Foam and McCoy Brown Drip items are mostly all marked oven proof; I bake Thanksgiving pies in Hull pie plates).

My mom’s favorite “advertising set” among ceramic kitchen collectibles featured the Pillsbury Dough Boy, whose form was made in everything from salt and pepper shakers to Cookie jars. The earliest versions were made in the 1980s in the classically chubby form that most of us think of when we think of this advertising character. Later versions were more stylized.

In former generations, it was common to repurpose worn-out items so that they could continue to be used. This could be a means of controlling household expenses by modifying items originally designed for one purpose so that they could continue to serve another needed purpose.

Today, people are still doing this as a means of saving damaged antiques, a process called upcycling or repurposing, which seeks to reuse/reconstruct items to create a new product of higher value than the original. The success of recycling to create something better and more valuable than the original depends on several factors, including the basic value of the original item, availability/scarcity of the original item, and aesthetics of the new upcycled item. This article explores examples of upcycling/repurposing, some efforts more successful than others.

Example of a Successful Upcycle

As I’ve written about before, I have an extensive collection of Mirror Brown pottery, made in large quantities by various makers in the mid- 20th century, including McCoy and Hull, which are no longer in business. Something I would consider a successful upcycle would be the wall clock I have that was made from a Hull dinner plate. What made it a successful upcycle is that it doesn’t compromise the continued secondary market availability of the many Hull Mirror Brown dinner plates that one can use as originally intended.

The clock is a nice addition to my kitchen area. Is it worth a lot of money? No. Is it worth a bit more, at least to me, than a regular Hull dinner plate? Yes, even if I’m not talking about a big bump beyond the value of the original plate from which it was made. In any case, I didn’t buy it because of its monetary value but because of its practical usefulness, which has served me well for the past 20 years since I bought it.

Upcycled Parts for Lamps

Old glass companies usually had lamps among their products – and, of course, over years of use, those lamps did not always weather the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Missing or damaged parts could sometimes be replaced with other original parts.

More recently, though, we’ve seen lamps offered for sale that are not so much upcycled as “Frankensteined,” i.e., made with old glass items but not necessarily lamp parts. Some companies, such as Fenton, did make multiple use of their glass moulds; for example, a vase mould might also be used to make something else such as the base of a lamp. But there is an aesthetic knack to this, and while an original manufacturer usually had the talent to do it, it’s clear that some later entrepreneurs decidedly did not.

My dad swore by cast iron cookware. He liked using it to cook over his antique cast iron cooking stove (We had a gas range, but he preferred the old stove). He said the cast iron pans heated more evenly and made food taste better – and when I visited my parents as an adult and ate at their table, I had to agree!

Dad was very particular about his cast iron cookware – most of which was, like the stove, antique or near-antique. I remember with fond smiles the way Dad objected to Mom’s insistence on washing the pans with soap and water, which Dad said ruined the patina. My dad took to wiping out the pans with paper towels, oiling them, and then putting them away in the old stove’s oven as soon as possible after he’d used them and before mom could notice. Most of the time, he got away with it.

In addition to his frying pans, Dad also had other cast iron cookware, among which was a very large, handled pot which hung over the fireplace on the other side of the stone chimney into which the old cast iron stove was vented. He cooked in this pot only very rarely since the fireplace didn’t produce the more uniform heating in his cast iron stove, for which the pot was too large.

Manufacturers of Cast Iron Cookware

The most famous name in cast iron pots and pans was Griswold. This company, founded in Erie, PA, dates from 1865. Its pots, skillets, and bakeware are marked on the bottom with the name Griswold in a square cross enclosed in a double-rim circle. The company ceased production in 1957, but the pans can be found on the secondary market in antique shops and online auctions. They are very popular among cooks, and it’s not unusual to see them priced in three figures today.

In the 1910s, the name on the back of the pans was in a subtly italicized form within the cross and circles. In the 1920s and ‘30s, the Griswold mark appeared in block lettering; it is these pans that are most desirable on the secondary market today. This logo was large and extended over almost the entire bottom surface of the cookware. Beginning in the early 1940s until the company ceased production in 1957, the size of the name and its surrounding logo became much smaller.

Along with each of these Griswold logos was inscribed the place of origin, Erie or Erie, PA. The Griswold brand name was acquired in 1957 by the Wagner foundry, which continued making cast iron cookware through the mid 1960s with the Griswold logo but without the Erie, PA, since Wagner was located in Sidney, Ohio. In the early to mid-1960s, the pans were marked with both the Griswold and Wagner logos.

Lodge was another maker of cast iron cookware, founded in 1896 and still in production. Its first factory was destroyed by a fire – a frequent early 20th-century disaster at foundries and potteries that had open fires for production. The Blacklock family, which founded and owned the company, opened a new factory nearby as Lodge Cast Iron, which is still in operation today. The surfaces of its pans are somewhat rougher than Griswold’s, and it is priced much more economically on the secondary market than either of its rivals, Griswold or Le Creuset.

Wall tiles aren’t just an antique decorative accent but a treat for modern collectors. They have a long history: Ancient tiles were being used for paving various surfaces as early as centuries before Christ. But most of the oldest wall tiles seen today date from the 1880s and have become collectible in their own right as well as sought after for home décor. Some older tiles were made of metal, but collector interest today is focused on the ceramic tiles. They were originally used as backing behind stove pipes, as flooring, or as decorative accents in hallways or around doors. These inlaid tiles were described using the adjective “encaustic.” As described on Giovanni’s Tile Design web site, giovannistile.com/blog/the-history-of-decorative-tiles, encaustic tile combines a plain clay base with a stamped area that is filled with colored liquid clay and fired to fuse the different layers together. These encaustic figural art motifs are the tiles of most interest to collectors today.

Antique ceramic tiles were usually about a half inch thick vs. a quarter inch for modern tiles. Still, the thicker width of old tiles did not protect them from damage; it is often difficult to find undamaged tiles today, especially sets of matching older tiles for contemporary home renovation projects. Damage could happen over time while the tiles were in place, or they could be damaged in the process of dismantling and removing them. Tiles taken directly from walls will often have on their backs the cement used to install them, which prevents identification of the maker’s mark and patent and pattern numbers that are usually included on the backs of the original tile. Collectors prefer clean backs that reveal these manufacturing details.

Manufacturers Worldwide and Close to Home

Decorative tiles were a worldwide manufacturing phenomenon. Most of the more famous tile manufacturers were based in the United States, England, Portugal, Morocco, and Japan. Over time, the term “Moroccan” has been used to denote a style rather than a point of origin. But the most famous and original Moroccan tile maker is Zellig, which was actually founded in Morocco and has been functioning for centuries right up until today.

Perhaps the most famous of American decorative tile companies was the J. & J.G. Low Co., founded in Chelsea, MA, in 1877; it closed in 1902. Other American companies founded in the late 1880s included the American Encaustic Tiling Co. in Zanesville, OH (which later morphed into the Shawnee Co.) and Grueby Faience Co. in Revere, MA (closed in 1921). The backs of American Encaustic tiles are marked simply with the company’s initials A.E. (An English company called Alfred Meakin from the 1920s is also marked simply with initials A.M. The use of just the initials may seem to us today a bit of braggadocio by companies so proud of their work they didn’t even have to use the whole name, but it’s more likely that early tile making was restricted to just a few companies, making the use of the initials more readily identifiable at the time).