Fairfield County, Ohi0
Here are two traditional stoneware jars from the Elder Farm in Pleasantville, Ohio, and a ceramic pitcher whose origins I’m less sure about.
The two late 19th century / early 20th century jars — one which I took from the farm in the 1990s and one given more recently by my mother — feel to me like survivors from a bygone era.
The wooden farmhouse where these pots came from sits on a rural Fairfield County road and holds generations of family memory. My mother, Martha Ann Elder, was born there in 1938, and her father, William Howard Elder, in 1900, which was about the same year the house was completed.
I rescued the larger piece from the farmhouse’s stone-walled basement—dark, cool, and faintly damp—where it probably sat untouched for decades. My grandparents, or perhaps someone before them, had simply placed it on the upper ledge of the cellar wall, where it remained, almost forgotten, long after the work it was made for had disappeared.
From what I’ve read, stoneware like this once played an important role in farm life across southeastern Ohio. Before refrigeration, families would rely on thick, salt-glazed crocks to carry food through the winter. Their durable, non-porous surfaces made them ideal for storing pickled vegetables, salted meats, apple butter, and fermented foods such as sauerkraut. Some jars were used dry, for grain, beans, or flour; others were packed with brine and sealed with cloth or wax.
They belonged in cool cellars and springhouses, where they were tended seasonally and scrubbed clean when emptied.
The Elder jars, one marked with a pair of simple cobalt-blue brush marks, belong to that tradition of utilitarian craft: sturdy, unadorned, and made for work. Even after their purpose disappeared, they remained where they had been placed, preserved less by intention than by inertia, waiting for someone to notice them again.
The Stoney pitcher entered my life differently. It didn’t come from the Elder homestead but from my sister Betsy DeWitt, whose in-laws were collectors of antiques. Its hand-painted pastoral scene—a mill, trees, and a winding path—carries a tone of nostalgia. It’s also more decorative than utilitarian. The name “Stoney,” inscribed on the handle, gives it a personal touch, as if the pitcher once belonged to someone known by that nickname (which happened to be my nickname in university). Unlike the stoneware jars, which were shaped by necessity, the pitcher feels like an object chosen for beauty or display. It represents a different thread of inheritance: not the practical tools of a working farm, but the collecting and preserving of things that had acquired meaning beyond their original purpose.
Together, these pieces connect two different ways that objects move through families. The Elder Farm jars speak to the daily labor of earlier generations—the unpretentious, repetitive work of storing, preserving, and enduring. The Stoney pitcher speaks to a later act of collecting, gifting, and passing things forward.
Each of these has ended up in my possession, carrying stories of place, family, and the curious ways in which ordinary objects might outlast the hands that once used them.
