FAHRENHEIT 2300 by Crocker Farm

Jon Kay, the director of Traditional Arts Indiana, recently launched a great new podcast called Artisan Ancestors. Jon describes it as a “podcast where I explore ways to research and understand the past,” and he does just that, talking to professors, researchers, authors, and scholars about American decorative arts. A couple of weeks ago, Jon interviewed me about Crocker Farm, our stoneware-related research, and the Commeraw project. If you’re at all interested in any of those topics, and you can put up with listening to me talk for twenty minutes or so, you might want to give it a listen. I think you may find it interesting.

(For those completely new to this sort of thing, a podcast is essentially an internet radio broadcast; it just takes a click of the mouse to listen.)

Click here to check it out.

(Once there, simply click the play button or the “Play in new window” link on the left-hand side of the page to start listening.)

We are extremely pleased to announce that we have purchased the historic Gorsuch Barn in Sparks, Maryland, as our new headquarters and auction venue. The Gorsuch Barn was built in 1841 for John M. Gorsuch, a prominent Maryland landowner who farmed wheat and corn off of his hundreds of acres of land near Glencoe Village, Maryland. A stone barn, it was decorated with what has been called “the finest example in Maryland of brick louvers set in native stone.” The striking red brick louvers, or vents, were placed into the structure in what is often called a “sheaf of wheat” pattern. It was the theft of wheat from the Gorsuch farm that ultimately resulted in the famous Christiana Riot of 1851, in which the barn’s then-owner, Edward Gorsuch, was killed by a group of free blacks in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Gorsuch had attempted to reclaim slaves who had presumably stolen his wheat and then fled his farm, but the bloodshed that resulted helped further divide the nation over the issue of slavery and fomented anger amongst Southerners, including Baltimorean John Wilkes Booth, a close friend and classmate of Gorsuch’s son. Though it took place almost a decade before the conflict of the same name, the Christiana Riot was described in one newspaper headline as “the first blow” of “Civil War.”

We are thrilled to be able to acquire this historic property, and are in the process of converting it into a first-class auction facility. Our intention is to make the Gorsuch Barn the auction home for stoneware and redware in the United States. Our address is now 15900 York Road, Sparks, MD 21152, which is located just off of Interstate 83, about thirty minutes south of our old auction location at the York Expo Center. As we prepare our new building for its grand opening, we are also, of course, gearing up for our Fall 2010 auction, and will be loading our first photos of featured lots onto the website on Wednesday, September 8. We will soon be firming up the exact date.

We cannot emphasize strongly enough the unique opportunity that our first auction in our new building will present for you to showcase your stoneware and redware. If you are considering selling your pottery, we feel that this inaugural auction, presented in an atmosphere that we have never before been able to achieve at our previous locations, will attract a record-breaking crowd of serious bidders. Please feel free to contact us for a free evaluation of your pottery. Our seller’s commission is still 11%.

Stay tuned to our website for more exciting news as Crocker Farm continues to grow, and, as always, if we can help you in any way, please do not hesitate to call or email us. Thank you all for your support over the many years, and we look forward to the future in our new home!

Good Evening Everyone,

Tony, Luke, Mark and I are very excited and proud to announce the marriage of our eldest son, Brandt, to Dr. Janna Pachuski on Saturday, August 15, 2009. Janna is a pediatrician who is Chief Resident at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. Brandt will now be residing in Pittsburgh, PA, and will continue to be a very important part of our business. He will, of course, still be present at all of our auctions. We hope you will join us in wishing them a long, happy and prosperous life together.

Happily Yours,

Barbara Zipp

We’ve taken a month-long hiatus from blog posts as we prepared the catalog and otherwise geared up for this Saturday’s auction. We’re getting back into the swing of things now, and will resume posting things regularly. We should have a couple of more articles up by the weekend, with more to follow. Thanks for reading, and we hope to see many of you this Friday and Saturday!

Crocker Farm Summer 2009 Auction of American Stoneware & Redware
OVER 300 LOTS of Antique American Ceramics (Entire Online Catalog).
York, Pennsylvania, Expo Center (Directions).
AUCTION: Saturday, July 11, 10am.
Preview: Friday, July 10, 1-4pm. Saturday, July 11, 8-10am.
HOW TO BID.
Visit our home page for more information.

One of our goals as we run Crocker Farm, Inc. has always been to use credible, incisive research–often done in period, primary sources–to help illuminate the objects we sell. Antique American stoneware and redware have, both in the past and now, been saddled with misinformation, loose conjecture passed off as fact, incorrect attributions, and information gaps that should be filled in. We try to combat these problems as much as possible.

But besides our auction catalogs, conversations with our customers, brief entries on our website, and scattered articles in periodicals, a good, easily-accessible, centralized forum to disseminate information on antique American utilitarian ceramics simply does not exist. We hope this new addition to CrockerFarm.com changes that.

We named our new blog, Fahrenheit 2300, after the common, approximate firing temperature of salt-glazed stoneware. We feel the name conjures images of looking into a kiln as the staggering heat turns mud dug out of the earth into stone, and conveys a sense of excitement we feel whenever we see an important piece of pottery for the first time, or dig up some new information on a potter.

We plan to make this an active, frequently-updated platform for everything from brief, one-paragraph comments to in-depth articles on antique American stoneware and redware. We also think it will give us the opportunity to expand on specific pieces outside the confines of proper catalog descriptions. Above all, we hope it will be a fun way to fill a void for much-needed scholarship on one of America’s most important handicrafts.

We are launching the blog with a couple of posts already up for you to read, with more to follow soon. We hope you enjoy it.