Grace Styvers
When we first started digging at our unit (OA11) at site BcGn-15, I was unsure of what we were going to find. I definitely was not expecting to find as many burnt rusty nails as we did, but I was also not expecting to find a ceramic sherd with a legible factory mark. I had taken Lab Methods 2: Transformative Tech before field school and really enjoyed the ceramic portion of the course, and so I was excited at the possibility of identifying this ceramic sherd. Over the four weeks of excavation, we only found two sherds with the same factory mark, and while both are fragmented, they do not form one vessel, meaning that there are at least two vessels from the same manufacturer at the site. From the factory mark, Kate was able to identify that the sherds were manufactured by the pottery company Alfred Meakin.
After doing some of my own research on the Alfred Meakin company and the sherds, I found that the company was named after Alfred Meakin, one of four brothers who were pottery manufacturers in England. From 1865 to 1873, Alfred was in business with his brother Charles Meakin at Meakin Bros / C & A Meakin; however, in 1873, he left Meakin Bros / C & A Meakin and created his own company in Tunstall, England, named after himself. In 1896, the company became a limited company, and after Alfred died in 1904, the company was owned and run by his son, Alfred James Meakin, and later his nephew, Stuart Johnson. In 1974, Myott, another pottery manufacturing company, purchased the company’s share capital, leading to its eventual merger with Myott-Meakin Ltd in 1976. The company specialized in earthenware tableware and tea sets.
The sherds we found on site are refined white earthenware and most likely came from a tableware set. While there is no visible decoration on the sherds, we were able to tell from the factory mark that, in their complete form, the vessel would have had a gold border, as indicated by the “_OLD BORDER” written below the factory mark. After the company became a limited company, they began including ‘Ltd’ after the company’s name in their marks; however, in the 1930s, they stopped including it. Our sherds do not have ‘Ltd’ in their marks, which indicates that they were produced in or after the 1930s.
While they changed over time, Alfred Meakin factory marks often included the names of their patterns or shapes’ names above the mark, and so it is reasonable to assume that the “hape” above the mark is referring to the vessel’s shape. While we do not have the rest of the mark and are unable to definitively identify the shape, after a couple of hours of looking at different Alfred Meakin factory marks, I was able to find one that matches the one we found on site. The image below shows a mark that is the same design as ours and has the same patent number. It also indicates that the vessel is a Harmony shape. While there are differences between the two marks, such as the fact that ours states there’s a gold border while the online example does not, the similarities could suggest that our sherds came from a vessel with the Harmony shape.
Originally, we thought that the number underneath the mark was a UK pattern registration number; however, the complete example I found online with the same mark shows that it is a U.S. patent number. Typically, this would suggest that the ceramics design was registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office; however, after discussing it with Kate and looking up the number, it corresponds to a fabric printing machine patent from 1868. Given this mismatch, and after talking with Kate, it is possible that the number on the ceramic may be a fake patent registration used to discourage other companies from copying their designs. The mystery of the patent number raises some questions about the circulation of these ceramics. Alfred Meakin was strictly a UK based company, but it may be possible that, at some point, they began producing some of their products for export to the United States, which would offer another explanation for the USA patent number. These sherds could also give us some insight into the people who occupied the site. Our unit and others have found U.S. related artifacts such as U.S. wheat pennies and a Boston fountain pen nib, so it is possible that the people who occupied the site had connections to the United States, possibly through work, family, travel, moving to Canada, or entirely different circumstances.
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