The Development of Pottery Industry in America

(with illustrations)

This book presents the Development of Pottery Industry in America since Columbus.

The first European settlers found the American natives proficient in the manufacture of earthen vessels, and we would not be justified in supposing, even in the absence of documentary evidence, that our ancestors were more ignorant of the useful arts than the Atlantic Coast Indians, who, less cultured than the prehistoric mound builders and the Pueblo races of the West, were in possession of rude, but often ornamental, utensils made of baked clay and sand.

Primitive potteries for the production of earthenware on a small scale were operated in the provinces at an early period, but as only the coarser grades of ware were needed by the simple inhabitants of a new country, no extended accounts of them appear to have been written by the older historians.