DUPRS_0015 Maddock Pottery

DUPRS_0015 Maddock Pottery

Maddock Pottery Sherd

Descriptive Information: Flat white pottery shards with the stamp of Maddock’s Lamberton Works Royal Porcelain on them. The shards are smooth to the touch but some of the glaze is beginning to flake off. I cannot tell what object this pottery shard was once was.The shards are roughly 1cm in thickness and range from 2-3cm in length to 6-7cm in length.

Thomas Maddock & Sons, Moses Collear, C.A. May and Thomas P. Donoher.

Drew University, Department of Anthropology

1893-1900 - for this specific print mark dates.
The company dates from 1893-1915

Aisha Arain

Pottery - Porcelain

The Lamberton Works first opened in 1869 by three local Quaker businessmen. The pottery was located along Third Street between Landing St. and Lalor St., in the Lamberton section of Trenton. In 1888, Thomas Maddock purchased the pottery, renamed it the Lamberton Works Co. In 1923, one-time Maddock office boy D. William Scammell purchased, along with his five brothers, the plant and the ongoing china business from the Maddocks, which the Scammells ran successfully until it closed in 1954.

Lamberton China was the name given to the hotel china made by Maddock Pottery Co. which was known for their manufacturing of fine grades of semi-porcelain in table and toilet wares. The firm’s primary interest was the production of toilet wares but their hotel china was used by many prominent hotel & restaurant customers included the Waldorf-Astoria, United Hotels Corp, William Penn Hotel, and train services such as the Pennsylvania, the New Jersey Central, the Union Pacific, the New York Central, and the Southern Pacific.

Considering the other objects found on the site are of household items such as food containers, buttons, and doll pieces I believe that the pieces of Maddock’s pottery are probably household toilet wares or high end China. Furthermore, the indication that Maddock Pottery Co. was used by upper class businesses one could assume that the pieces found on this site come from a possible upper middle class household. However, there is also a strong possibility that a majority of this pottery could also be the result of a hoarder’s large collection of porcelain wares. Nevertheless, without any household foundations found on the site one could make a wager that this site was a local household dumping ground.