An American Potter 
AN 
AMERICAN 
POTTER 
I T has been said that a new birth of art 
is taking place in this twentieth century. 
Those who have broken away from the 
beaten tracks of wholesale production, and 
have sought to create beautiful objects by in¬ 
dividual effort of hand and brain, give truth 
to the statement. 
Unfortunately these 
persevering few are 
still overpowered by 
a majority whose 
production is ruled 
by Quantity a n d 
Speed. But the sat¬ 
isfaction remains to 
us to recognize this 
individual eft o r t 
whenever it is found. 
The work of Mr. 
Henry C. Mercer, of 
Doylestown, Penn¬ 
sylvania, is of this 
conscientious and in¬ 
dependent kind. In 
the course of his re¬ 
searches in archaeol¬ 
ogy and ethnology 
he has turned to re¬ 
viving an art long 
since buried by mod¬ 
ern methods : the 
art of tile-making by 
means of ceramic 
processes practiced by the potters of Europe 
before the trick of porcelain was discovered and 
before machines for rapid reproduction were 
invented. In collecting the ancient relics of 
eastern Pennsylvania and the household im¬ 
plements of the German colonists who came 
there early in the eighteenth century, he saw 
the potter’s art as it was brought from the 
Fatherland by the Rhenish-American settlers, 
being abandoned and forgotten as the years 
passed by which separated them from their 
former homes. Eager to stay the decline of 
so rare a craft, he 
aimed first to gather 
the frag m e n t a r y 
knowledge which re¬ 
mained of it and to 
inspire the rural clay 
workers to recover 
their neglected skill. 
Journeying into 
the counties of 
Berks,Lancaster and 
Bucks three remain¬ 
ing kilns, found in a 
fitful state of exist¬ 
ence and worked by 
successors of the old 
craftsmen,were made 
subjects of study. 
There were all the 
primitive tools of 
shapes and forms 
tried by the labor of 
centuries. Chief 
amongthese,the pot¬ 
ter’s wheel, wasfound 
but little changed 
from the form in 
which it has passed through the ages, even as it 
has been found in the remains of early Egypt. 
As the moist mass of clay revolved on the 
wheel disc touches of a practiced hand brought 
it to its shape and gave that freedom of line 
which graces the early pottery and of which 
