Evening at the Kiln at Old Sturbridge Village June 13

The massive 1830s-style 24-foot-high brick kiln at Old Sturbridge Village will come alive on Sat. June 13 as Village potters fire it up to 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit and fire a year’s worth of vintage-style redware pottery hand-crafted at the museum.

Jeff Friedman of Princeton, Mass., head of pottery interpretation at Old Sturbridge Village, demonstrates early New England pottery making, crafting all the items necessary in early New England: mugs and milk pans, inkwells, washbowls, jars, flower pots, pitchers, platters and pudding pans.

STURBRIDGE, MA:  The massive 1830s-style 24-foot-high brick kiln at Old Sturbridge Village will come alive on Sat. June 13 as Village potters fire it up to 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit and fire a year’s worth of vintage-style redware pottery hand-crafted at the museum. Low-fired earthenware is called “redware” since the clay takes on a brick-red color after firing. OSV potters will be stoking the kiln fire all day in preparation for a special “Evening at the Kiln” firing from 7:00 – 9:00 p.m. June 13.

Daytime visitors to the museum can watch pottery demonstrations and the kiln preparation. Visitors to the special evening kiln firing can try their hands at “throwing” a piece of pottery, enjoy appetizers and drinks in redware mugs, and watch the glow as sparks fly into the night sky. Evening event: $35 per person; $30 for museum members. Pre-registration is required: www.osv.org, 1-800-SEE-1830.

Built with 15,000 bricks, the Old Sturbridge Village kiln is an “updraft bottle kiln, exactly replicating one used by farmer/potter Hervey Brooks in Goshen, Conn. in the early 1800s.  When fully loaded for firing, the kiln holds 800 freshly glazed pots stacked 10 feet high.  It takes three cords of wood stoked over 24 hours to bring the kiln to maximum firing temperature of 1,900 degrees. At that temperature, the kiln bricks glow and the flames roar, engulfing the inside and rising 24 feet high to come out of the top of the stack. The pottery is fired all night, and it takes another 40 hours for the kiln to cool before the dramatic “drawing the kiln” – unloading the finished wares.

“Of all the activities we demonstrate at the Old Sturbridge Village, firing the potter’s kiln is surely the most dramatic,” notes Jeff Friedman, of Princeton, Mass., head of pottery interpretation at OSV. “It’s a rare opportunity to see an oven of such size roaring and glowing.  You can even hear a tiny clinking sound as the pots contract upon themselves, and nothing is as exciting as opening the kiln door, one brick at a time, to see the finished pots.”

Friedman notes that with a vintage-style kiln, managing the heat is a tricky business to make sure that the pots come out right.  The fire is first stoked with hardwood, but to reach maximum temperature, the potters must then switch to pine, which burns more quickly.

“The balance between under stoking and over stoking is very fine.  If the fire isn’t hot enough, the glaze will not form properly.  If the temperature is too hot, the pots will become so soft with the heat that they give weigh under their own weight and collapse,” Friedman says.

The OSV kiln was built using two different mortars used in early New England: a clay/sand mortar for the inside, which must withstand the high heat of the fire, and a lime/sand mortar for the exterior, which must resist harsh weather.  The whole structure is bound together with steel bands forged in the museum blacksmith shop.

Throughout the year, museum potters demonstrate pottery-making in Hervy Brooks original workshop, which was dismantled and moved to the Village in 1962.  Using a foot pedal pottery wheel, they make all the wares of a typical 1830s potter: mugs and milk pans, inkwells, washbowls, jars, flower pots, pitchers, platters and pudding pans.

Local farmer/potters were a fixture in early New England, providing a necessary service to rural communities. They usually dug clay from the earth on their own farms, often near the bend of a river, where good clay was often found. Their wares – once commonplace – are now collectors’ items, as their art vanished, leaving little documentation.

Hervy Brooks, however, left a nearly complete set of account books, documenting his trade from 1802 to 1864, when the demand for locally-made earthenware was eclipsed by tin and imported English ceramics.  Old Sturbridge Village potters rely on Brooks’ records to accurately depict the craft of a farmer/potter daily to museum visitors.