1812

The Edmands pottery works is established at 55 Austin Street (corner of Richmond Street) by Barnabas Edmands and a brother-in-law, William Burroughs. Charlestown had extensive deposits of clay (silt from the outwash of departed continental glaciers) and became a center of ceramics, pottery and brick manufacture. New England’s first documented potter worked in Charlestown using this clay. A number of early potteries clustered along the Charles riverfront from where their products were shipped to Connecticut and Maine.