OFFICIAL WEB SITE
POTTERY TOWN
White Hall, Illinois
Hard Back Book
386 pages
Limited 1st Edition
$159 (includes S/H/I)
coipsgm@netscape.net
618.974-2490
“POTTERY TOWN, White Hall, Illinois,” is a large-scale synthesis and summation of the regional White Hall potteries and potters, their Nineteenth Century pottery manufacturing methods, their kiln sites, and the West Central Illinois region’s clay ceramics produced.
As America’s Midwest frontier regions became settled in the early Nineteenth Century, many seeking improved social, economic, and religious conditions took advantage of the opportunity to obtain quality ground at low prices. This opportunity attracted a variety of trades and was a promising means for many to sustaining better livelihoods. Most common were families geared toward obtaining rich ground for farming. Some farmers potted on the side to satisfy their personal household and storage needs. Their important secondary side talent of potting occasionally expanded to provide wares to neighboring farms and the community, and pot making sometimes grew into their primary business, as farming became their secondary family task. The abundant supply of the region’s excellent quality potter’s clay attracted opportunistic potters. Such were the pottery operations of William Heath, John Neff Ebey, George Ebey, David Brunk, the Davis brothers, David Culbertson, A. D. Ruckel, the Vermillion brothers, William Teter, and the White Hall Sewer Pipe & Stoneware Company.
Many made the early Nineteenth Century immigration trek from Europe to American eastern States, to settlements in Ohio, Indiana, and Tennessee, and to remove westward to the Illinois counties of Sangamon and Scott.
SINCE 2015