It was a squirrel, appropriately enough, who led Tom Colwell down the path to collecting.
He was in the fourth grade, and a classmate had brought the small, cast-iron animal figure to school. The classmate traded the squirrel to Tom for marbles, the currency of grade-school boys in the 1950s.
The path led him to an obsession to collect “things,” he said, including political campaign buttons. But what he is known for is his collection of pottery that was made in Jug Town, as Calhoun is known, as well stories of the colorful history of the 16-plus potteries whose kilns once rose above the town.
Tom suspects from the way partnerships rose and dissolved over the years that ownership of the potteries changed hands over the poker table. One partnership ended in bloodshed on the streets of Calhoun. The victim was Frank Rabine of Huntingdale, 20 miles west of Calhoun, the first entrepreneur to dig up clay in Calhoun. He hauled a wagonload back home, where he started a pottery.
That was in 1873. Three years later, Rabine moved his pottery to Calhoun , establishing the first pottery there with partner John Light. The partnership ended six months later when Light shot Rabine at the railroad station, an event witnessed by the whole town.
“Everyone showed up at the railroad station on Saturday morning to see who came in on the train from Sedalia,” Tom explained.
Suspecting that Light, who later went into business with a relative, had sabotaged their pottery, Rabine began making accusations. Taking offense, Light confronted Rabine at the station. An older man, Rabine carried a club for protection and struck Light with it, knocking him to the ground senseless.
When Light came to, he stood up and had a revolver in his hand, which he pointed at Rabine. Rabine hightailed it for home, at which point Light shot him in the back. Rabine made it to his door, collapsing after saying “John Light killed me.” Light was absolved of the killing, Tom said, due to a ruling at a coroner’s inquest of self-defense. Both men are buried in the Calhoun cemetery.
Tom used the “History of Henry County” and local newspapers — The Henry County Democrat, the Clinton Eye and the Windsor Review— to compile a list of potteries, which supplied a large percentage of the pottery produced in the country in the last decades of the 19th century. Then he scoured Sanborn fire insurance maps of Henry County to locate and date the potteries. He also found the few photographs that exist, and mapped the location of the structures.
Otherwise, the history would be gone, along with the potteries and their stories.
“There isn’t anything left — nothing,” Tom said of the sites.
Tom, also a product of Henry County, was born in Clinton, buit has lived in Calhoun most of his life. He attended school in Windsor, graduating with the largest graduating class (82) in 1965. He currently works as the groundskeeper and janitor at the Armory in Clinton. He is a member of both the Windsor Historical Society and the Henry County Historical Society, and served as assistant director and as a volunteer at the Henry County Museum. In 2018, received a Heritage Award from the HCHS for long-time service.
The museum has a collection of Calhoun pottery, which Tom gives programs on. Jugs still turn up at auctions and estate sales -- but only if you know what you’re looking for, according to Brenda Dehn, a director of the Henry County Museum.
“There are thousands of pieces of Calhoun pottery in the area,” Tom said. “The ones that are valuable are marked.”
His first purchase was a small quart-size jug, which he got at auction for $10. Rencently, a three or four gallon jug marked " Edwards-Minish Pottery" brought $975, Tom said. He once bid $1,950 on a rare, yellow crock with cobalt blue printing from Damron and Miller, but didn’t get it, he said. The crock had never been seen before, and was one of a kind.
The owners of Calhoun’s potteries were primarily men, he said, as were the employees. But when Frank Rabine was killed, leaving the pottery in debt, Amanda Rabine, a widow with three children, took over and not only turned the pottery around, but got it into profit within a year. She also made drainage tile and flower pots, Tom said. Amanda Rabine owned the last pottery that remained in Calhoun. It closed in 1903.
The reason: by the early 1900s, enameled Queensware and aluminum ware, which was affordable and lightweight, started to replace pottery. By 1910, the potteries were all gone, and the jugs ended up in the ditch, Tom said.
Back in the late 19th century, however, people usually owned two or three pottery jugs. They had lids that were sealed with sealing wax, and were used like canning jars to store apple butter and strawberry jam. Bigger pieces held sauerkraut or cooked sausage layered with lard. Tom said. The sealed jugs, when stored in a cool cellar, would keep food preserved for several months, or until Christmas. Tom said.
His collection ranges from 10-gallon jugs that still smell of sausage to miniature jugs an inch tall, which accomplished potters wore around their necks on a string. The potteries also employed men to dig up the clay, wood cutters to stockpile the mountains of fuel needed to fire the kilns, and people who prepared the clay.
“They dried it, ground it and sifted it,” he said, then reconstituted the dry clay with water.
The pieces were all turned by hand, he said, with a flat board used to smooth the sides. Then they were dipped in a barrel of glaze, and the drips wiped off, leaving stripes on the bottom of the jug. Many of the jugs were glazed a dark brown called “tobacco spit brown” Some were double dipped, leaving darker bands where the potters turned the jug upside down and held them by the top.
“I have pieces that have the fingerprints of the guys who dipped them,” he said.
After the potteries closed, Calhoun clay was still shipped elsewhere, he said, and was used to make decorative panels for buildings in Kansas City, including the Orpheum Theater and the Bell Telephone building. Tom once talked to a man who as a young boy in the early 1910s, lived on the north side of the train tracks in Calhoun. The boy remembered seeing men lined up on the bank next to the railroad who were employed to load clay into boxcars. One worked in the middle with two men at each end. The boxcars often became so hot that the workers collapsed and had to be carried out, where they were put at the end of the line.
“They were paid 10 cents an hour,” Tom was told, adding “They were probably glad to get it.”
When he was in 4th grade, it was your collection of marbles that represented your wealth and skill. Almost every boy had a cigar box of marbles with a hole in the top, Tom recalled. Instead of shooting marbles, the popular playground game was to take one of your marbles, and holding it at waist height in front of you, try to drop it through the hole in the lid into someone else’s cigar box. If you succeeded, you won two of his marbles. If you didn’t, the marble was forfeited.
Tom thought the cast-iron squirrel he traded for marbles was a paperweight, but it turned out to be a bottle opener.
Tom Colwell can be contacted through the Henry County Museum (660-885-8414 )or email hcmuseum1@gmail.com.
