William Brunt Sr. dies

DEATH OF CAPTAIN BRUNT.

Last of East Liverpool's Pioneer Potters Loses Long Fight

Against Death.

Captain William Brunt, Sr., the last of the founders of the Ohio pottery industry and the man who made the first "white ware" ever successfully marketed west of the Allegheny Mountains, died at his home in Chester, W. Va., Tuesday morning, aged 81.

Mr. Brunt was born in Burshem, England. He was a "forty-niner" during the California gold rush, and returned from the west in 1855 with a snug fortune of $5,000. With that he embarked in the pottery business, and in the half century that followed he founded five pottery concerns in East Liverpool.

Soon after his first plant was built he enlisted as a private in the civil war, leaving his factory in charge of a foreman. But the foreman ran away to elude the war draft, and the business went to smash. Brunt returned from the war with a captain's shoulder straps, revived his business and by 1875 had built two more potteries, and, at the head of the famous firm of Brunt, Bloor, Martin & Co., had been the first of the Ohio Valley potters to break away from the old "yellow ware" trade, and manufacture the white "stone china."

Mr. Brunt practically retired about 1905, after his principal enterprise, the plant of the William Brunt Pottery Co., had burned and had been rebuilt three times. After the third fire Captain Brunt named it the "Phoenix Pottery." His death wipes out the old guard of before-the-war pioneers in the industry in the Ohio Valley. Others of the famous group of veterans who have died in the past seven years are his brothers, Henry Brunt, John Croxall, William Cartwright, and Isaac W. Knowles.

Mr. Brunt organized the Potters National Bank in 1881 and was its president at the time of his death. His wife survives him with the following children: Mrs. B. M. Louthan, Mrs. W. H. Cartwright, and W. S. Brunt, of East Liverpool, O.; Mrs. W. H. Diedrich, of Chester, W. Va., and Mrs. W. B. Greene, of Cleveland.