Vintage Bennington Pottery

Bennington Potters of Vermont was founded by David Gil in 1949. From the beginning, the pottery was well regarded for its Mid-Century Modern pottery, from the Honeycomb dinnerware it made for Block China Company to its cheerful Raymor-branded line of trivets, mugs, and pitchers. (Raymor also worked worked with Russel Wright on that firm's American Modern dinnerware, which was manufactured by the Steubenville Pottery Company of Ohio.) Bennington's physical foundation, if not its sense of aesthetics, actually goes all the way back to the late 18th century. That's because Bennington Potters was built on the site of the venerable Norton Factory, which was founded by John Norton in 1793. As a regional pottery, Norton initially produced redware before moving on to more durable stoneware items such as crocks. By the end of the 19th century, the Norton Factory had grown to become the biggest ceramics manufacturer in the United States. In the 1840s, members of the Norton family who ran the company after the death of its founder in 1828 brought in a new partner named Christopher Webber Fenton. The Fenton period was short-lived, but it propelled the Norton Factory to its 19th-century dominance. Fenton hired a number of employees from a Staffordshire, England, pottery called Copeland and Garrett. These artisans helped Norton produce lines of Parian ware (a type of porcelain), as well as a line of mottled stoneware known as Rockingham. Beginning in 1849, many of these pieces were manufactured by an offshoot of the Norton Factory called The United States Pottery, but that concern closed in 1858. One other 19th-century Norton Factory innovation was its scroddled pottery, which was produced by mixing clay of different colors together before a piece was shaped. Pieces with this marbled appearance are quite rare today due to the fact that scroddled pottery was not especially popular in the 19th century. It was also fragile, which means few pieces have made it to the 21st century.