12:17 AM


 If you have been reading each installment of the Salesman’s Journal: Glassware, Chinaware & Queensware, I applaud you for your diligence and consider you an authority in kaolin! 

This time, we find our salesman has left Boston and headed for East Bennington, Vermont where pottery is still being manufactured today. It is October 31th and there is no mention of Halloween, so this holiday wasn’t observed like we do today. The chinaware factory he visited is highlighted on the Bennington Museum’s web site as,
. “The United States Pottery company (1847 - 1858) produced ornamental objects including yellow ware with Rockingham and flint enamel glazes, agate and granite wares, porcelain and parian. Technically innovative, the United States Pottery Company gained national prominence when its wares were featured in the 1853 Crystal Palace Exhibition in New York City.”

Bennington, Vermont
US Pottery & co.
Parian & Agate ware
J & E Norton
Stoneware

Wednesday, October 31- I left Boston at half past 7 o’clock a.m. by Fitchburg Railroad for Bennington, Vermont.  Fare to Troy New York was $5 and Troy is some 20 miles further west beyond Bennington. 
 The train passed through Cambridge and Concord, Massachusetts, Keene and Walpole, New Hampshire, Bellows Falls and Rutland, Vermont and reached North Bennington about half past 4 o’clock p.m.
            The china ware factory is in East Bennington, which is four and a half miles from North Bennington ---Not knowing that these facts I got carried past North Bennington for ten miles and had to take a train back- but oddly, I reached East Bennington at the same time I would have- if I got off at the time I ought to have. I took a carriage and reached East Bennington about half past 7 o’clock p.m where I took a late dinner (turkey, yams with maple syrup and apple pie).
The State of Vermont respects the temperance law that began in Maine about a dozen years ago when a child was killed by intoxicated man driving a wagon, so no liquor such as port, brandy or whiskey can be found to keep a body warm in this cold climate. Women wear many flannel petticoats to keep themselves warm. As for me, I am wearing my traveling shawl over my coat indoors.

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Thursday, November 1- East Bennington is a quiet, neat, and very pleasant New England village, containing some 2,500 inhabitants, with five or six to churches. Here is the largest pottery in the United States named U. S Pottery & co. There is only one pottery here that makes common ware (half a dozen or more kinds of wares). Some of the wares are very nice and improvements are made constantly. 


They use some 200 ton of clay a per annum from South Carolina, that costs them $12 per ton in New York. I examined their works for washing the clay and for evaporating the water.  The proprietors were well pleased with the appearance of the samples I showed them and promised to test them and send me some pieces of ware at St. Louis.



One of them, who Is an Englishman, told me that if he had 10 rods square [30 x 30 feet] of ground containing clay as good as our best, that he would take no man’s ten thousand pounds [English currency] for it.  But -- he feared that the iron would spoil it. (I greatly fear that it [iron] will so hurt it [the clay] that it will take us more than five years to get rich enough out of it).
  
The same Englishman said that the samples I showed him had the appearance of coming out of a bed that had been stirred up and tossed about, and he recommend me to make further search for an original bed, and said he was very sure I would find it and that it would be clear from iron. I am embarrassed and impressed that this Englishman could look at our clay and tell the bed was located near the tapped out iron mines near Golconda, Illinois. I think there is some philosophy in what he says and I have great hope of finding a deposit that is pure clear of iron. After all, there are 1,200 acres and not all of it can be contaminated with iron. If we can, our fortune will be surely made.