The Mead Family Of Ohio Potters
Ira M. Mead (Sr.) was the first member of the family to come to North Springfield, Ohio from central Vermont around 1820. (North Springfield was a village located in Springfield Township of what was Portage County prior to 1840 and Summit County thereafter. Today it is part the Akron suburbs.) Biographical reports indicate that his three sons, Ira M., Abner R, and Truman P., were all trained as potters, and it is believed that this occurred because of their association with the family of Solomon Purdy. The Mead and Purdy families both lived for several generations in Manchester, Vermont with some members serving together during the Revolutionary War. In the early 1820′s Solomon Purdy moved from Vermont to Putnam, Ohio, (now a part of Zanesville), where he established a pottery. However, his wife died in 1825 or 1826, and he was left with 5 children age 15 and under. It appears that the Ira Mead family offered to help care for the children if Solomon moved north to Portage County where a substantial deposit of ‘fire’ clay had been discovered in the early 1820′s. Perhaps in repayment of their kindness, Solomon trained the Mead boys to the potting craft at about the same time that he was training his own three sons (and others) to the trade.
Ira M. Mead
What is quite clear from all documentation is that the family’s eldest son, Ira Mills Mead (I.M. Mead), was the leading investor and merchandiser of stoneware. On the basis of his recorded partnerships and the number of his products that have survived, he was a major producer from the mid 1830′s to the early 1850′s. Ira M. (the younger) was also something of a mystery man. His precise birth date is unknown, although it had to be sometime in the second decade of 19th century in Vermont, and it is not clear what happened to him after his pottery career. However, substantial records of his life during the years he operated in the Portage/Summit area do exist. His marriage to 21-year-old Jane Martin, the daughter of a widowed school-teacher from North Springfield, in 1832 is documented in Portage County records as is the death of their infant daughter, Martha, just ten months later. In 1842, Ira and Jane had a second daughter, but she too died at about the age of 3 or 4. Jane Martin was remarkable for that era because she retained her maiden name as she followed in her mother’s tradition of serving as a local school-teacher. However, just about a year after Jane’s death in 1849 at the age of 40, Ira M. Mead married Adelia Hathaway, one of several sisters from upstate New York who found husbands in the local North Springfield/Mogadore area.
Examining the early county tax records of Ira Mead is complicated by the presence of both a father and son with the same name. However, by about 1833 each had separate entries for personal property (usually horses and cows) and, thereafter, they each owned separate tracts of land with the father in the North Springfield area and the son in Mogadore (although both owned other tracts of 50 or 60 acres, presumably farms) Today the village of Mogadore is also a suburb of Akron. The last record of coexisting listings for each was in 1844. However, by that time Ira senior had purchased a farm in Richfield Township and was living there with his middle son, Abner. After 1844, all Springfield Township tax records are for Ira, the son, and there are many of these. One reason for the large number of records is his involvement in partnerships, and his most frequent partner was Robert Atcheson, the husband of one of Solomon Purdy’s daughters. Further, both Mead and Atcheson also partnered with another Mogadore potter, Jacob Welch. Clearly, Ira M. Mead was a wise investor who probably did rather little of the actual potting and served mainly as a manager. One clue to his business activity comes from a short passage in a 1940′s oral history of early Mogadore families. The report states that I.M. Mead
‘carried on a store and sold ware all around the country. He had men driving with loads of stoneware to many different towns. Mr. Mead had a fine personality, was always well dressed and wore white vests most of the time’.
Various stoneware products bear the identifying impression marks of I. M. Mead, but these were nearly always common crocks, churns and jugs. We have seen only a few pitchers and one or two coolers. Variation in the impression mark on Mead’s products exists, but the significance of these differences is not known. Perhaps the most desirable of the marks is the ‘I.M. Mead Mogadore, Ohio’ impression where the town and state names appear in italic font on separate lines beneath his name (in the usual block font). These pieces almost always carry a rather typical left-leaning cobalt floral decoration. Variants in the numbers of flowers in such arrays have been observed with as many as six on a tall 12-gallon cooler. The only exception to decoration on ware carrying this mark is on the one-gallon size. Other variations in I. M. Mead impression marks include just the name, the name plus ‘& Co.’, the name plus ‘Portage Co.’, and sometimes both the county and state along with the ‘& Co’. Of course, this means that ‘Co.’ indicates either county or company in appropriate context. About the only discriminative properties that can be attached to the variants is that pieces carrying the ‘Portage Co.’ mark were probably done prior to 1840. After that date the Mead pottery site became a part of the new Summit County because it was located just inside the newly established Summit county line.
As mentioned earlier, Ira Mead’s life after manufacturing stoneware in Springfield Township became something of a mystery. At about the time of the death of his first wife, Jane, and before his marriage to Adelia Hathaway, he moved to Cleveland and became a partner in a grocery store with Charles E. Kent. However, Mead must have retained some financial interests in Mogadore because he paid taxes on Mogadore lots until 1852 and personal property taxes until 1854. The Mead and Kent grocery partnership is documented in an 1850 Cleveland business directory, and their store was located about one block north of what is now Public Square. In the 1850 U.S. Census, Ira Mead is listed as living in Cleveland’s First Ward in what seems to be a lodging facility. According to this same census, his young partner, Charles E. Kent, a 31-year-old from Connecticut, and his family resided in the adjacent dwelling. After Ira remarried in 1850, his new wife, Adelia, gave birth to a girl and a boy within four years. However, the grocery business seems not to have prospered, and after a few years both the Mead and Kent families moved to Iowa. Although both went to Iowa, their partnership was apparently dissolved because their Iowa residences were over 100 miles apart. Charles Kent went to Buchanan County where he reported his occupation as ‘clerk’, ‘mill owner’ and ‘retired merchant’ in subsequent censuses. He seems to have spent the rest of his life in Iowa.
It is here that the Ira Mead mystery deepens. The earlier-noted biographical sketch on Mead done as a part of the Mogadore history project stated that he went to Des Moines, but for many years that could not be confirmed. However, recently, we have found that the state of Iowa conducted a supplementary census in 1856 and in that document the Mead family was recorded as living in Polk County near Des Moines with Ira listed as a ‘laborer’. The mystery arises because, despite a federal census just four years later, we could find no further indication of the Ira Mead family ever again appearing in any federal or state census. That disappearance includes all family members. No trace of Ira’s wife, Adelia, appears anywhere and about the only hint of the children is that a young man of the appropriate name and age for his son (George M. Mead) is listed in 1880 as an insane person living with a farm family in a county west of Des Moines. Subsequent U. S. census records reveal only one other person named Ira Mead who is of approximately the right age and state of origin, but we cannot be sure that this Monroe County, Michigan farmer is, indeed, one and the same with our Ohio potter. What seems clear is that, despite his early involvement and success as a potter, Ira Mead departed from the profession and established no family tradition of practicing the craft.
Abner R. Mead
The middle son of Ira Mead senior was Abner, and his association with the pottery business is the least well documented of any of the three brothers. Several history books about Akron and Summit County contain biographical sketches of Abner’s sons, and the sons always refer to their father as a member of an early family of potters with the implication that he was trained in the trade. Abner first appears in the 1837 tax records where he is recorded as owning 62.16 acres between Mogadore and North Springfield. However, later tax records indicate that his father, Ira, bought farm land in Richfield Township in the early 1840s and Abner moved there. He, along with his family, continued to operate that farm after his father’s death. After the death of his wife, Abner moved to Kansas where he was a live-stock dealer for 15 years, but returned to Ohio in the early 1890′s and lived out his days with his children and their families. As to the issue of his participation in the pottery trade, there is no firm supporting evidence. Census reports always refer to him as a farmer, and although he may have been trained to the trade as a youth, there are no verifying tax records and, most importantly, no known examples of ware bearing an A. Mead mark.
Truman P. Mead
The youngest of the three Mead brothers does have a clear record of stoneware production based on the existence of pieces bearing his distinctive maker’s mark. All currently known examples of his products appear with the impression mark ‘T. P. Mead’ using his initials in just the same manner as his older brother, Ira. Like his brother, there are some variations in his impression marks. His products sometimes appear with ‘Summit Co.’ along with his name. Clearly, such items must date to after 1840, and he may have been celebrating the establishment of the new county. To our knowledge, older brother Ira’s work never carried a Summit County mark; he always used only Portage County impressions, although both brothers appear to have operated in the Mogadore area in the 1840′s.
Tax records for Truman Mead are much less consistent than those for his brother, Ira. However, the earliest of Truman’s records were for personal property taxes in Springfield Township in 1841. In several ensuing years he had no entries, but by 1847 he was recorded as a land owner (about 100 acres) in Suffield Township of Portage County, and that was apparently his residence because he is listed as a farmer there in the 1850 U. S. Census. By 1851, he also owned a small lot in Mogadore that was on the south side of the main east-west street, not far from his brother’s property, and we presume that this was the site of the T.P. Mead pottery. That location was clearly on the Summit County side of Mogadore, although his residence (and farm) was in the adjacent township of Portage County. It appears that his pottery operated for about a decade during the mid-to-late 1840′s and early 1850′s. In 1853, Truman sold about two-thirds of his farm, perhaps in anticipation of leaving Ohio because his last property listing appeared in 1855 when he and his family moved to Minnesota. Truman and his wife, Louisa, along with their two daughters are listed in the 1865 census of Minnesota as living in Fillmore Township of Sumner County. His occupation always appeared as farmer, and he survived until after 1880 when he was recorded as a widower living in the home of one of his married daughters.
So, the Meads as potters lasted only one generation (unlike many other families in the craft). All three brothers took up other occupations and left their home area. However, it is noteworthy that a comparatively immense quantity of ware is attributable to Ira Mead over his 20-year period of operation and among all the potters in the Mogadore region his pots are the most frequently encountered by today’s collectors.
Reference note and research courtesy of F. Robert Treichler, Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology, Kent State University.