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Part of the American
History & Genealogy Project |
Maria Longworth Storer ~ 1849 ~ 1932
Maria Longworth Storer
Mrs. Bellamy Storer was born in
Cincinnati, in March, 1849. She studied especially music and
drawing when she was a child, and is greatly interested in
everything that could help to educate and enlighten other people
in both these arts. The Cincinnati musical festivals grew out of
a conversation with Mrs. Storer's friend, Theodore Thomas, when
he was visiting her in Cincinnati, in 1872. She asked him why
they might not unite together all their choral societies, and he
bring his orchestra and create a great festival organization. He
liked the idea very much and under his great leadership they had
musical festivals in Cincinnati which have never been surpassed
by any in England or Continental Europe.
In 1876 she was much interested in the exhibition of pottery and
porcelain at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, and became
anxious to have a place of her own to make experiments in native
clays. After working for a while in a pottery where granite ware
was made she started, in 1879, a pottery of her own in an old
schoolhouse she owned on the banks of the Ohio River. She named
the pottery "Rookwood,' after their country place. The first
kiln was drawn in February, 1880. For ten years after that she
worked there almost daily, selecting shapes and artistic
designs. Her decorators were usually young men and women who had
been students at the art school, an institution in which her
father, Joseph Longworth, was much interested, and to which he
gave an endowment of three hundred thousand dollars.
Mrs. Storer was given the patent for the using of a colored
glaze over colored decoration and the Rookwood pottery of that
time was dipped in a very thick deep yellow glaze, which gave a
rich tone to every color underneath it, like the varnish of an
old master. This ware obtained a gold medal at the Paris
Exposition of 1889.
In 1891 Mrs. Storer's husband was elected to the House of
Representatives and, on leaving Cincinnati, she gave the
Rookwood pottery to her friend, Mr. William Watts Taylor, who
had been business manager for four years and had put the pottery
on a paying basis. In her time it was rather an expensive luxury
costing her about two thousand dollars a year more than it
brought in.
Women of
America
Source: The Part Taken by Women in
American History, By Mrs. John A. Logan, Published by The Perry-Nalle
Publishing Company, Wilmington, Delaware, 1912.
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