Brimaur Mark
Q: I have a little pitcher or creamer that is incised on the bottom “brimaur farm pottery n.y.” I can’t find any info on it online or in any pottery books.
A: Your little Brimaur pitcher is probably a maple syrup pitcher. We found a 1954 gift-shop ad for Brimaur ceramics, but the company’s history remains a mystery. Brimaur syrup pitchers or creamers sell for under $15 today. Some of the pottery was marked “Elizabethtown, N.Y.” Does anyone have more information about this pottery?
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My father, Herbert Bruce Peters, came from Toronto at about 1937-38 to study Industrial Design at Pratt Institute in New York City. While there he was much influenced by the styles and thinking of the Bauhaus, Art Deco, Art-Nouveau, and the English artist potter Bernard Leach. Upon graduating from his course of study at Pratt, he took a job as director of a community center established in Elizabethtown, New York, where teaching classes in design and crafts were part of his responsibility.
Not long after, he was drafted into George Patton’s Third Army under whose hand somewhere in Germany he was granted United States citizenship, simultaneous with being awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. Upon discharge he returned to Elizabethtown, but the town fathers weren’t disposed to returning him to his employment as Director of the “Community Social Center”. Soon after, he decided to establish his own business on an old farm property five miles north of Elizabethtown towards the hamlet of Lewis. This early period of post World War II history deserves much more discussion, but gets away from responding to the posted comment asking for more information on the little syrup pitcher or creamer produced by my father at his business, Brimaur Farm Pottery.
The mentioned little syrup pitcher or creamer is typical of one of the categories of designs he produced during the years between 1947 and 1957. In addition to a full line of dinnerware, he produced commissioned designs as packaging for locally harvested maple syrup. He also had a contract with a company in Florida which sold “orange blossom honey” for whom he designed and produced a small pitcher jug packaging.
After many trials and tribulations, i.e. financial despair, he decided to abandon his business in 1957 when he and I went west. We wound up in San Diego where he promptly found work with Ryan Aircraft in the pattern and die shop. Later he succeeded in taking a position within the graphics design department of the U.S. Naval facility then known as Naval Electronics Laboratories (NEL).
Since, leaving in 1957, I made one return visit to Elizabethtown in 1999. Upon driving north of town to visit our old homestead, I was more than shocked to discover the beautiful old farm which dated from colonial times had been sold to some kind of wasted disposal company and it had been converted into a major dumping facility; the beautiful little creek where I regularly fished for rainbow trout as a boy and shared with families of beaver is completely polluted; the trees are all dead and not a sign of beaver anywhere. That creek, by the way, makes its way into Lake Champlain about nine miles to the east.
Within my personal collection of art items and objects from around the world, I have numerous pieces of my father and mother’s work produced during those years. For anyone interested in such topics, I can be contacted via mbpeters@yahoo.com