Maria Longworth Nichols Storer, daughter of wealthy Joseph Longworth, founded Rookwood Pottery in 1880 after being inspired by what she saw at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, including Japanese and French ceramics. The first Rookwood Pottery was located in a renovated school house on Eastern Avenue which had been purchased by Maria's father at a sheriff's sale in March 1880. Storer named it Rookwood, after her father's country estate near the city in Walnut Hills.[2] The first ware came from the kiln on Thanksgiving Day of that year. Through years of experimentation with glazes and kiln temperatures, Rookwood pottery became a popular American art pottery, designed to be decorative as well as useful.[3]
Rookwood was noted for its employment of women. Emily Faithfull mentioned in Three Visits to America that "perhaps there is no institution of the kind so successful as the famous Rockwood [sic] Pottery under the management of Mrs. Nichols" and stated "that the perfumes made by Young, Ladd & Coffin are put into dainty bottles, some of those I most admired being the 'Limoges jugs' made by the women-workers at the famous Cincinnati Rockwood [sic] Pottery, which is under the control of a very clever lady, the daughter of the wealthy wine-grower, Mr. Longworth. Some of the plaques, bowls, and vases produced at this pottery have deservedly received the recognition of leading Art connoisseurs."[4]
Clara Chipman Newton was the archivist and general assistant, as well as a china decorator, for the first decade of the pottery; she shared with Storer the responsibility for overseeing the decoration and glazing.[3] The artist Laura Anne Fry worked at Rookwood as a painter and teacher from 1881 to 1888.[5]
The second Rookwood Pottery building, on top of Mount Adams, was built in 1891–1892 by H. Neill Wilson, who was son of prominent Cincinnati architect James Keys Wilson.
