Edwin Bennett (potter)
Edwin Bennett (March 6, 1818 – June 13, 1908), born in Newhall, Derbyshire, was an English American pioneer of the pottery industry and art in the United States, and founder of the Edwin Bennett Pottery Company of Baltimore, Maryland. Producing a variety of wares from the everyday to the fine and artistic, his company, originally founded in the 1840s as the Edwin Bennett Queensware Manufactory, continued in operation until forced to close during the Great Depression in 1936. Examples of Edwin Bennett pottery may be found in museums across the United States, including the Maryland Historical Society, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Museum of American History, as well as in private collections. Life Edwin and his brothers, the children of Martha Webster and Daniel Bennett, a local Derbyshire coal company bookkeeper and Methodist preacher, apprenticed at the Staffordshire Potteries approximately from where the family lived in the Central Midlands. Arriving to the United States in 1841 Edwin, described in the sources as someone of robust constitution, first worked with his brothers James, William and Daniel in East Liverpool, Ohio, where James had recently founded the pottery industry. Soon the brothers relocated to