Hemingray Glass Company - Bromley Pottery

Potting in the Early Fifties.

TRENTON, N. J., Sept. 26.   -   A copy of your paper, recently fell in our hands and seeing an article on potting from Cincinnati it brought to mind scenes there in the early fifties when potting was most primitive there. Thinking some of the boys might be interested, I drop a line on the long ago. In those days we had but three potteries in Cincinnati and one in Covington. Each had two small kilns. In those days we were not fooled with Dingley or Wilson bills. We had about half the present tariff and nearly double present prices. Protection was unborn. Beef sold in the market by the quarter at three cents a pound; eggs eight cents per dozen; two drinks and two cigars for five cents; board from $1.50 to $2.50

Steam was unknown in potting in those days. A man could be a potter and live to be old; for instance, one of our men, Enoch Skinner, lived to be 90. Where do you find an old potter now under gold standard and high tariff? Our factories of all kinds are veritable slave pens. In the early fifties we had no girls in potteries and but few boys, none under seventeen years. Now we have protection and the slaughter of our children. When Sitting Bull came East he said what most astonished him was children in the factories.

But to return to the Queen City. Scott's on Front street, had one or two original characters. One was "Dutch John." The boys had much fun at his expense. Another character was Tom Evans. Tom always had stories to tell of the boarding house. One day Tom took the potato dish, scooped all on his own plate and passed the dish back to the astonished cook. At one of his dinner speeches he said it was strange the chickens had no breasts in Ohio. Another of Scott's characters had no feet, they having been frozen and amputated. The boys used to get his shoes off and then the poor fellow could not move till he did as told.   -   OLD POTTER.