“Lord, yes,” she said. “So what would you like to research?”
“The Lee family. Riverton itself, past and present. Mr. Weaver. Cordelia’s demise. Any and all local history you’ve got.”
“You have a seat in there, where it’s comfortable,” Anne said, pointing to a smaller side room containing several stout oak tables with comfortable chairs around them. “I’ll start bringing you local history material. Goodness knows, we’ve got enough of it.”
She wasn’t kidding. After delivering a second armload of books to my table, she giggled at my startled expression.
“Just let me know when you need more,” she said, and returned to her work.
I studied the volumes she’d selected. I was puzzled by the first book in the stack—a cookbook published by St. Sebastian Episcopal Church in the 1970s. But when I checked the index, I found three different Lees had recipes in it—Ginevra, Morgana, and Annabel. Annabel had six recipes in it, which was two more than anyone else in the book. Cordelia wasn’t represented, under either Lee or Mason. Was she not Episcopal like the rest of her family? Not a cook like her cousin? Or simply not living in town when the book was published? I opened up my notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe and made a note to find out. And was either Ginevra or Morgana my great-grandmother? Another note. I also jotted down a reminder to copy out a few of the family recipes and reached up to grab the next book on the stack, a thick coffee-table-sized book.
To my astonishment, its cover featured a beautiful color photo of a piece of the same white-and-aqua pottery that decorated Annabel’s kitchen. The title of the book was Biscuit Mountain Art Pottery.
And the author’s name was Jeremiah Lee. Another ancestor, or at least cousin? Was this pottery factory merely a piece of town history, and did it have some connection to my family?
I opened the book and eagerly began scanning the photos. In addition to the white-and-turquoise pots Annabel collected, there were other striking color schemes—gray and rose, salmon and teal, and a surprisingly modern purple and green.
I tore myself away from the pictures and began racing through the text. Apparently my ancestors had settled on Biscuit Mountain in colonial times, intending to farm, and found they’d landed in the middle of a morass of clay. They’d had a lean time of it until they stopped trying to grow crops on their land and began digging it up and baking it into pots. After that, the family’s star began to rise. The book mentioned that they made both stoneware and porcelain, and were among the first to make porcelain on this side of the Atlantic.
They really hit their stride in the 1880s when they jumped onto the bandwagon of the Art Pottery Movement, and for a while Biscuit Mountain’s wares had rivaled those of more famous Art Pottery manufacturers, like Roseville, Rookwood, Van Briggle, and Weller. They’d had a commercial advantage, since they were able to dig several kinds of useful clay out of their mountain. Riverton grew from a sleepy village to a prosperous town. The Lee family grew rich, and many of their employees had also made small fortunes.
But the company’s prosperity began to decline after World War I. Apparently, my ancestors were savvy enough to have invested most of their money in something other than pottery, so when the pottery business went belly up during the Depression, they managed to hang onto their position as the town’s wealthiest and most influential family. But only because everybody else had lost so much more. Riverton had never recovered, and its population had been in a long, slow decline for the last eighty years.
I looked around to see if the library offered Internet access to patrons. Yes, and one of the two slightly outdated computers was unoccupied. I went to eBay to see if any Biscuit Mountain pottery was on sale. I found two pieces, each going for several hundred dollars. If people really paid that much for the stuff, Annabel had several thousand dollars’ worth of the family crockery in her kitchen. And I’d bet that wasn’t her only stash.
But still, Biscuit Mountain was small potatoes compared to its rivals. There were over 800 listings for Van Briggle pottery, for prices up to $5,000. Over a thousand Rookwood, over two thousand Weller, and nearly eight thousand Rosevilles, all at even steeper prices than Biscuit Mountain pots.
I went back to my stack of books, loyally telling myself that I’d rather have my family’s pots than any of that other stuff. Well, than most of it. And at least, since the Biscuit Mountain crockery was selling in the low three figures, maybe I could splurge and buy a bit of the family history.
Next on the stack was a slim pamphlet about the Biscuit Mountain Ostrich and Emu Ranch. Which, according to the text, had been founded in 1992 by Mr. Hosmer Eaton on property that had formerly been part of the Biscuit Mountain Art Pottery Works. I wondered if that meant Mr. Eaton had bought the land directly from some of my family, or if they’d lost the land when the pottery factory went out of business. And was the ranch—