If you lived in East Liverpool at the turn of the 20th century, chances are you either owned a pottery or worked in one, according to Megan Coil, the director of the Museum of Ceramics.
The eastern Ohio town of around 10,000 residents was once known as “America’s Crockery City,” and from 1840 until 1930, the city’s potteries produced more than half of the ceramics manufactured in the United States. Over the years, more than 200 potteries have operated in and around East Liverpool. Coil, who was born in East Liverpool, said that without pottery, East Liverpool “wouldn’t have really had a city, a community.”
The Museum of Ceramics, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was founded in 1980 and is housed inside a former post office building. Offering displays, collections, and ceramics classes, the museum is intended to tell the story of the growth and development of the ceramic industry from the home of the industry’s humble beginnings in the United States.
“The museum is just highlighting our story with the pottery industry and how we supplied the dinnerware and everything … all over the country,” Coil said.
The museum houses more than 4,000 pieces of local pottery, according to Coil, including the world’s largest display of Lotus Ware, a type of porcelain invented in East Liverpool that is considered by many pottery experts to be the finest porcelain ever produced in the United States.
The museum’s displays also include photographs, ceramics and other artifacts to showcase not only historically accurate ceramic products, but also a glimpse into the day-to-day life of this time period. Other displays teach museum attendees about the social, political and economic history of East Liverpool, examining how the local ceramic industry forever shaped the small community.
Judith Schwartz, professor emeritus in the Department of Art and Art Professions at New York University and the president and founder of the Museum of Ceramic Art in New York, said the historical accuracy of the museum in East Liverpool is important because it allows attendees to consider how life functioned in the past.
“The future is so uncertain, but the past can be so completely understood,” Schwarz said.
The lower level of the museum focuses on ceramic production. Attendees are able to take a closer look at full-size dioramas of a jigger shop, the interior of a kiln and a decorating shop — all designed to accurately reflect pottery life in the 1900s. Aside from the displays, the museum also offers art, ceramic and clay classes, a feature that Coil says functions to unite the community in their shared history.
“I hope that [museum attendees] learn that even though we’re still a small town, we have a very interesting history,” Coil said. “I hope that they take away kind of just a sense of the community that we were.”
The museum operates in partnership with the Ohio History Connection, an Ohio nonprofit that works to preserve the state’s history, and is one of OHC’s 50 Ohio history sites. OHC owns the former post office that the museum is housed in and has loaned several historical pieces of pottery to be a part of the museum’s collection.
“They’re a wonderful organization to work with,” Coil said. “We really could not operate without that partnership with them.”
While the museum is located in small-town Ohio, the region’s contribution to the history of ceramics is far from small. According to Margaret Carney, a ceramic historian and the founder, director and curator at the International Museum of Dinnerware Design, Ohio is “the cradle of civilization for an awful lot of pottery.” Because ceramics is “part of who we are,” Carney said, it is important to preserve the history of the industry.
“It’s so important to maintain these records, because the dishes are the records of how people lived and dined,” Carney said. “It’s preserving a history which is rapidly disappearing.”
Coil hopes the Museum of Ceramics keeps the history of the town alive. According to Coil, many visitors to the museum actually worked in the potteries and are able to share their own personal stories while examining the town’s shared history, which once dominated the American ceramics industry.
This, Coil said, serves as an important reminder: “Even a small town like East Liverpool made a difference among the whole country.”
Thank you for such an insightful article. We believe the Museum of Ceramics is a gem among museums. It is historically correct but certainly not boring. Megan Coil, our Director is such a hard worker and also a pottery lover. She represents us Well! I just want to set the record straight: Lotus Ware is Bone China, not porcelain. Even Homer Laughlin produced porcelain for a very short time, but only one other pottery here produced bone china.