CERAMIC ARTS—GENERAL SURVEY.
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We are to consider, however, the difficulties under which we labor; the possession of the coal, the clay, the transportation and an expanding market are not sufficient; we need the labor and the enterprise to bring these dormant sources of wealth together. As in Wedgwood’s time, there are those who think this can be done but in Great Britain, and that we should send our clay, our sand, and our coal, over the ocean to be worked into objects for our daily use. The writer of Wedgwood’s life, published in 1865, says :—
“ No country situated as America then was, and is now, with her civilization thrust centuries back by the curse of blind and intemperate party strife and internecine war, can hope to gain perfection in an art. A country in this condition gains most by the export of raw materials and the import of manufactured goods.”
As yet we have barely begun to explore for and to understand the varied sources of potters’ materials which are known to exist all over the country.
There is no need of looking about for anything connected with the art, unless it be the artistic inspiration to be gained % contact -with older civilization and the artistic culture which ^ the inheritance of mankind.
American materials are more and more brought into use at the American potteries, to the exclusion of those formerly imported. In Chester County, Pennsylvania, and its vicinity, there are establishments for mining, washing and preparing haolin or fine china clay, equal to an/ from Cornwall, in England. There are valuable beds of such clay in South Carolina, Georgia, and in Illinois in Pope County, at which last-named place a superior clay is obtained and is highly valued at the Ohio potteries and others.
There is an abundance of fine quartz and felspar rock throughout the Eastern and Middle States, and mines have heen opened in Maine, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, ail( l Maryland. Mills to crush and grind these materials, with ex pensive machinery, have been erected at several points on the Susquehanna, at Trenton, ^ind on the Connecticut, and 111 various places in the West.