Potters enjoy the search for buried ceramic treasure

When Dad and a helper dug the basement for our new home, they encountered some extremely tough clay. They put a concrete floor over the rest of the basement but left this clay part to be floored later. I discovered big fat fishing worms living in that moist clay.

When digging worms one day, my hoe clanked on something, and I dug up a pink flint arrowhead. How did that handmade arrowhead, 4 inches long, get buried there several feet below ground level?

With the mysteries of the whorl and the arrowhead still in my mind, I enrolled in a dig sponsored by the Missouri Archaeological Society. There, at Arrow Rock, in the hot July of 1996, I encountered a deep layer of tough clay - and baby fishing worms curled up into tiny coils smaller than a pea. But there were no arrowheads. We were looking for the site of Newton Caldwell’s old pottery workshop with kiln, clay pits or waster dump, in downtown Arrow Rock.

Arrow Rock is an old town at a point where covered wagons crossed the Missouri River on their way to Santa Fe, N. M. Because of the abundance of usable clay there, potters made the jugs, jars and other vessels needed by those courageous pioneers.

Broken pottery pieces - called shards - were easy to pick up on lawns and along fence rows, yet no one could hazard a guess about the possible location of kilns or waster dumps.

Two octogenarians were amused that we wanted to dig at all. They and their predecessors plowed up broken shards, hoed them out of their gardens, dulled their mower blades on them and stubbed their toes on them when they swam in the creeks.

About 145 years ago, Newton, the son of Thomas Caldwell, left the family pottery manufacturing business south of Fulton and went to Arrow Rock. He and others produced pottery there for many years. Marked Caldwell pots are now prized by collectors.

My potter friend, Wyn Painter, continues to research the family history. He and I were the only potters at the digging site that hot summer.

We hoped to find something - a shard would suffice - with "NGC" on it, but we knew we would have to put it in the bag to go to the lab. When shards looked familiar, I gave them the "spit and polish" inspection before they disappeared forever.

Before we put the dirt back in the hole, a woman who owns an 1838 home nearby brought a jar to show me.

"We found it in the house when we moved there," she said.

That jar shouted Caldwell. It was quite similar to jars made by Newton’s father. The general shape, the salt glaze with orange peal texture and the finishing touches around the rim all fit the Caldwell pattern. Holding and caressing that beautiful old jar made the five-day dig worthwhile.

I had learned a lot, but finding buried treasure wasn’t to be.


Click here to return to the index
Copyright © 1994-2010 Sue Gerard. All Rights Reserved. No text or images on this website may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the author, except small quotations to be used in reviews.