WHO makes RED CLAY pottery?

RED CLAY potters are often studio pottery, but FRANKOMA is the most famous red clay pottery. Probably more than 50% of the red clay pottery found in America today is from FRANKOMA, an Oklahoma pottery started by John Frank. Early FRANKOMA is NOT red clay, but was made of Ada Clay from Ada, OK. In the mid-Fifties, Sapulpa clay was used, and it was a red clay. Some of the more recent Frankoma is even more red than the Sapulpa clay color. Most of the Frankoma red clay pieces are marked, BUT NOT ALL. You can find a treasure if you know what you are looking at, and red clay is a start.

HARRIS STRONG used red clay for many of his beautiful tiles, and early PETERS AND REED pottery was RED CLAY. Grueby pottery is red clay, too, but we do not often see a piece of Grueby.

Much of the RED CLAY production pottery comes from CANADA today, and it is BLUE MOUNTAIN POTTERY, known for a drip glaze in green and black. They made beautiful animal figurines in different sizes, many with drip glazes.

There are so many pieces of pottery available that are not easily identified, and maybe YOU have one. I will be available to look at some of these if you contact me, and hopefully I can identify it or tell you where to look for the identification.

Happy hunting American pottery!

TAN CLAY Vintage American Pottery Identification

TAN CLAY potteries are more difficult to identify by area. DRYDEN pottery used TAN clay for much of their early production in KANSAS and even some of the ARKANSAS pottery. ROSEMEADE produced tan clay pottery with tiny dark specks throughout, and they were in North Dakota. There were also some other potteries that worked in the North Dakota style (particularly one that made Pine Cone designs) that used tan clay.

CANADA pottery is often a tan clay that they call MOCHA. It was made on the eastern coast--and although this discussion is about AMERICAN pottery, this one can be confusing. There are also FOREIGN potteries that use tan clay, and ITALY is one of the best, but most of their pottery is marked as to country of origin--whereas the Canadian production is tagged only.

There were also some American STUDIO POTTERS who used tan clay, but their works are usually marked on the bottom with a hand-written name.

The nice feature about tan clay is that you can usually EXCLUDE Ohio potteries and Texas potteries if you see tan clay. The production potteries from these states
did not use tan clay.

Remember, turn the pot over to locate an area that is NOT GLAZED to see the clay color. Don't let the GLAZE color confuse you. That is not the CLAY COLOR that we are looking at here.

Happy hunting until next time!

Linda
cajunC

WHITE CLAY potteries were in Arkansas and Texas primarily

TEXAS produced pottery in the 1950's that was Art Deco in appearance. Some of it is stamped with ALAMO POTTERIES stamp, but much of it is marked only with numbers. These are STRAIGHT numbers on the WHITE clay, and they help identify Alamo Pottery. GILMER POTTERIES also produced white clay pottery at the same time, and in much the same style, with an Art Deco appeal.

CAMARK POTTERY of CAMDEN, ARKANSAS was making art pottery with hand painting and often flower designs during the Mid-Century Modern Era, (1950s) too. They used WHITE CLAY to make florist pottery as well as figurines. NILOAK POTTERY was also making white clay pottery figurines and florist ware in ARKANSAS. Some of these pots and figurines are marked, and some are not. Some have numbers to give some help in identification, but even if they do not have numbers, the WHITE clay is of great help in determining the company that made it.