The Burley and Winter Pottery Co., aka, Burley Winter or BW, was a great American pottery company located in Crooksville, Ohio. BW started its business in 1872 and it lasted until the mid 1930’s. Like many American pottery companies no longer in business, BW’s early items included functional stoneware utility vessels, such as thunder mugs, (aka chamber pots), slop buckets, tankards, cuspidors poultry fountains, (aka chick feeders), pitchers and bowls, jugs, and crocks.
Many early BW pottery pieces have a heart symbol and embossed name on the bottom. Many BW pieces have an incised Burley Winter name and mold number on the bottom, and some BW pottery has no mark.
Later BW is known by its distinctive blended glazes and attractive gardenware and art pottery like urns, bulb bowls, jardinaires, oil and sand jars, vases, strawberry pots, bird bath and garden pool ornaments. BW also sold Halloween pottery pumpkins, cookie jars, and bean pots.
BW appears to have sold its products to numerous companies as well as individual customers. Some of their customers would have been farmers, florist shops, creameries, dairies, chemical companies, Kresges, pickle companies, etc.
More Than McCoy is my on-line store which carries many BW items including, as the book relates, one of the finest items that Burley Winter ever produced, which is the floor vase featuring an embossed Grecian theme as shown in the picture. We also carry many of the blended glaze vases.
BW is usually very difficult to find and can be quite costly. However, once you purchase your first piece of this great pottery, you will fall in love with it. Every piece is unique in its glaze and it is heavy, durable and beautiful. It also fits in with modern and arts & crafts décor.
FYI: There is a new BW company producing a select few of the old pottery molds, however, it is marked as new BW, and it is fairly easy to spot the new from the old once you have handled a lot of pottery. One way to detect new from old is to look at the bottom of the piece. View the rim to see if it looks old; if not, then run your finger around the rim edge. An old piece will be smooth and a new piece will be rough. Check the mark if there is one. As stated previously many pieces of old BW are not marked and some pieces just had paper labels which came off over time.
The glaze on most BW blended glaze items is a mottled, matte glaze, and it may have a bit of a sheen to it, but I have never come across a high gloss glazed BW piece. There are some BW pieces that are a solid color, but most are blended. The colors range from blue, purple, pink, pumpkin, green, tan, cranberry, mustard, aqua.
BW is not made with terra cotta clay, (many unskilled dealers try to pass off faux BW from China and Mexico, and most
