The Dodge Family Association

Jabez Dodge - Exeter Pottery
In our Genealogy data base, his name is given as Jabesh
[Benjamin(4), Ebenezer(3), John(2), Richard (1)]

The Exeter Pottery Works was established in Exeter, New Hampshire, in circa 1771 by Jabez Dodge (b. 1746/47, d. 1806) . Jabez was possibly trained by one of the numerous potters in Essex County, Massachusetts, near Exeter, where he established the "Dodge Pottery".

This site was the training ground for four of his sons. His third son, Samuel, worked at the Exeter pottery with his father and in 1819, built the structures that were used continuously throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, known as the Exeter Pottery Works.

Jabez's daughter, Nancy, was married in 1811 to John Lamson (b. 1785), who had trained and worked as a potter at the Dodge Pottery. Nancy and John's son, Asa B. Lamson (b.1818), also became a potter and eventually took over the pottery works in 1838. Asa's son, Frank, (b. 1859), began operating the family business in 1878. Although Frank continued manufacturing pottery at Exeter, he eventually expanded his operations to include the distribution of goods made elsewhere.

In 1935, following four generations of the Dodge-Lamson families at the helm, the Exeter pottery works closed. Frank Lamson died in October 1936.

The Exeter Pottery works, for most of its existence, produced red earthenware pottery, also known as redware. Redware, produced in all the colonies, supplied local utilitarian needs for food preparation and storage vessels.

In the 1880s, increasing competition from domestic stoneware potteries resulted in a vast reduction of the Exeter Pottery Work's production of red earthenware. Consequently, the pottery works diversified further by taking on the wholesale distribution of the popular stoneware - probably made in New York and New Jersey, but stamped with "Lamson's".

Taken from the Dodge Family Journal, August 1992