Beauty Before Comfort: A Memoir. Allison Glock

mass production had replaced fine craftsmanship, and the newer, more efficient potteries subsumed the antiquated boutique potteries, which relied exclusively on manual labor. Crockery City was crowded. Across the river, Newell and Chester were becoming the brave new pottery worlds. Unlike East Liverpool, which had grown to its limits between the twin barriers of hillside and river, Chester and Newell offered fresh possibilities. They had the same clay. And in West Virginia, the hill slopes were largely empty, the riverbank land primed for habitation.

      What was needed was a bridge. In 1897, the first bridge to connect East Liverpool with Chester was built. Streetcars ran over it, carrying developers to West Virginia and potters to Crockery City. In 1900, Taylor, Smith and Taylor opened a pottery in Chester. The Edwin Knowles and Harker Pottery Companies would follow them.

      Not to be outdone, the Homer Laughlin China Company began construction on the Newell Bridge on June 2, 1904. It would cost $250,000, and was erected just a quarter of a mile from the Chester Bridge. It opened a year later, on July 4, with a celebratory first crossing. HLC bought acres of land in Newell. They also bought a pottery site large enough to house a thirty-six-kiln factory, what would be the largest pottery built to date.

      Other potteries saw HLC as foolish; it was hubris to build so large a factory on the whiff of a promise. Barely anyone lived in Newell. Certainly not enough people to staff a thirty-six-kiln factory. But it was HLC that prospered, while its competitors, hobbled by inadequate factory designs and outdated equipment, began shutting down their kilns. The bridge and HLC’s promise of steady work brought intense expansion to Newell and Chester. In 1906, only a few houses stood in Newell. By 1907, there were more than 130. HLC not only constructed the bridge and the plants but laid down streets, erected more houses, and created ball fields. HLC either built or bought everything in Newell, down to the streetcars, the waterworks, and the schools. In 1917, the company even produced a car, the Homer Laughlin, a stretch convertible sports car with stitched leather seats and gleaming running boards.

      The Blairs settled in Hancock County the same year. Andrew became a potter as soon as he could and quickly rose through the factory ranks to become a decorator, the most sought-after position in the factories. Decorators, also known as hand painters and liners, didn’t have to hoist crates or sweat over kilns, and they were the most highly paid clay shop workers. Andrew spent his days trimming plates, cups, bowls, platters, goblets, and gravy boats with liquid gold. He’d take a tiny brush, no thicker than a rose thorn, and hand-line the edges, one after another, precisely and neatly, allowing no margin for error. Liners had prestige, and a staff of decal girls, women who would add flowers and garlands to the plates and cups before firing.

      The decorator’s kiln was the smallest. It measured only six feet high and burned at a lower temperature, just hot enough to set the colors and decals, but not so hot that it cracked the glaze. Different colors required different temperatures, so pottery was loaded on shelves and separated by ceramic stilts. After firing, the ware would cool and kiln-men would draw the pieces out, now baked to a brilliant shine.

      Andrew recognized his good fortune and worked tirelessly to preserve it, often logging double shifts for weeks at a time, never stopping even to read the newspaper. While he may have settled for a common wife, Andrew Blair refused to succumb to the conspiracy of circumstance that had brought them together. He pined for culture. He taught himself how to play the ukulele and the mandolin. Then he taught others, for a price. He shied away from what he saw as low-rent habits, such as gambling and public affection. He did spit tobacco, but only in private and into a tureen he’d painted with deer and hunters in jaunty red caps.

      He was not one of those other people, the men who soaked their shirts through with sweat and had clay packed under their fingernails even on Sundays—sour-smelling men in ill-fitting pants, spitting as they laughed. Andrew knew he was different. He never wore anything that didn’t fit, never left the house looking less than altogether dandy, his trousers cutting a sharp line down his thigh, his coats free of pottery dust. When he trimmed his prize peonies, he donned a tie. He walked ramrod-straight, and he valued vertical posture in others. It bothered him to no end that his wife was stooped, burdened by her diabetes and her immense weight. Lazy, he thought.

      When he wasn’t at the pottery, he was in his backyard studio, making china dogs with gold eyelashes or bunnies with silver bows to sell on his own. Blairware, he called it. He had a hand-cranked wheel, a circle of marble that sat on top of a cast-iron stand. It was on this wheel that he spun plates painted with gurgling babies, ballerinas with lace skirts, and mewing kitty cats, their claws tipped with purple dye. He stamped “A. C. Blair” in liquid gold on the bottom of each frilly little plate and china novelty.

      In time, he created other lines. Although Andrew Blair was not a member of the Ku Klux Klan, he liked their business, so he founded the A. C. Blair Klan Plate Company by snatching up blank plates from Harker and HLC and painting them with Klan motifs. The best-selling items were the platters that were painted red and yellow, with a fiery cross in the center, and those with a masked Klansman on horseback, the cross ablaze in the background. They are collector’s items now, these plates. Prized by the same type of men who covet Nazi helmets and Civil War medical kits.

      Hancock County was a hotbed for the KKK, especially during my grandmother’s youth, when they focused their rage on the east end of the panhandle, where many of the area’s black and Italian potters lived. The Klansmen operated under the dubious motive of enforcing blue laws, and they broke into homes, ostensibly searching for liquor. They also marched through the potteries, hooded and draped in white, demanding that the bosses fire any Italian workers. The police did little to stop them, as those who weren’t intimidated by the Klan were generally members.