Woe "Poor Potter" of Yorktown 



Pottery making in colonial Virginia, strongly discouraged by 

 a mercantilists England, seemingly was almost nonexistent 

 according to the Governor' s reports which mention but one nameless 

 "poor potter" at Yorktown, whose wares are dismissed as being 

 low in quantity and quality. This paper, the combined effort 

 of a historian and an archeologist, provides evidence that the 

 Yorktown potter was neither poor nor nameless, that his ware was 

 of sufficient quantity and quality to offer competition to English 

 imports, and that official depreciation of his economic importance 

 apparently ivas deemed politic by the colonial Governor. 



The Authors: C. Malcolm Watkins is curator of cultural 

 history in the Smithsonian Institution s Museum of History and 

 Technology, and Ivor Noel Hume is director of archeology at 

 Colonial Williamsburg and an honorary research associate of the 

 Smithsonian Institution . 



I 



Part I: Documentary Record 



C. Malcolm Watkins 



n his annual reports on manufactures to the Lords selected one or another of these references to the "poor 



of the Board of Trade during the 1730s, Virginia's potter" to support the view cither that manufacturing 



royal governor, William Gooch. mentioned several was negligible in colonial Virginia or that ceramic art 



times an anonymous "poor potter" of Yorktown. At was limited to the undeveloped skills of a frontier 



face value, Gooch's reports might seem to indicate potter. 1 The recent development of archeology, how- 



that manufacturing was an insignificant factor in 



Virginia's economy and that the only potterv-making 



& ' ' r ' 'i For example: [homas [efferson Wertenbaker, The Old 



endeavor worth mentioning at all was so trivial it s . //( , /; . v .„ V(uk: Scrib . 



could be brushed aside as being almost, if not quite, ner > s> 1042), p. 265; J. Paui Hudson, "Earliest Yorktown 



unworthy of notice. Occasionally, historians have Pottery," Antique* (May 1958), vol. 73, pp. 472-473. 



PAPER 54: THE POOR POTTER OF YORKTOWN 



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