Tea Leaf Ironstone China
By Thomas P. Heinecke
The origin of Tea Leaf china, like many other dinner wares commonly used in the United States during the 19th Century, can be traced to the United Kingdom and more specifically to the great pottery districts of Staffordshire including Stoke and Burslem.
Staffordshire had been producing large quantities of transfer decorated ironstone since the very late 18th Century for sale both at home and for export to the Continent, America and Canada. By the 1840s the technological improvements in the quality of ironstone is believed to have led to a stylistic shift and increased public demand for plain white ironstone vessels and tableware.
Anthony Shaw of Burslem is generally credited with first introducing a line of white ironstone simply decorated with a copper luster Tea Leaf motif in the mid 1850s. Over the next several decades the popularity and demand resulted in perhaps 50 or more English potteries replicating the basic line while expanding the variety of shapes and varying the Tea Leaf with other designs including tobacco leaf, teaberry, and rose. Some of the better or more common names associated with this era of English Tea Leaf manufacture include Shaw, Clementson, Meakin, Furnival, Gridley, Mellor and Taylor, and Wedgwood.
Later in the 19th Century American manufactures started production as durability and simplicity became the fashion for American tableware. By the end of the century the style had run its course and although reintroduced briefly in the 1960s, Tea Leaf has yet to achieve the same everyday use and desirability it once knew.
Today, the vast number of Tea Leaf shapes and designs make for a spirited collecting field with hard to find patterns and forms ranging into the thousands of dollars.