The Anna Pottery of Union County, Illinois
Cornwall Kirkpatrick, brother Wallace, and father Andrew, relocated to Anna, Union County, Illinois from Mound City, Illinois in the winter of 1858 and fired their first ware the following spring. Andrew senior was a potter born in Washington County, Pennsylvania and worked there and in Knox County, Ohio before moving further west to Illinois. Between 1859 and 1896 his sons built and operated a large stoneware pottery in Anna and exhibited their wares at such important international exhibitions as the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876 and the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 as well as at numerous local and regional fairs.
Collectors know the Kirkpatrick brothers best for the eccentric and humorous novelty wares they made as a sideline to their regular business of utilitarian crockery, but throughout the latter part of the 19th century they were also the principal mid-west producer of stoneware containers and reed stem tobacco pipes. Among their wares highly prized by today’s collectors are pig-form flasks incised with railroads maps, bizzare inkwells with horney toads and other creatures and temperance jugs with applied snakes, etc. A line of cobalt decorated stoneware was also produced in the early 1860′s. The Anna Pottery closed in 1896.