What Is It

What Is It?

This page is designed to provide a place where anyone can submit pottery/stoneware items that they are unsure of the intended purpose, manufacture, or the history behind it and allow our viewers help identify them.

Please submit items and answers to link provided below.

I know its a little brown mini jug (2.5" tall), The question is who made it? Anyone with info on this unique mark please feel free to email a reply. Submitted by: Jim and Edie Chapman

Submitted by: Craig Fyock

Reply:

THE WM. RADAM H I S T O R Y :

Medical "miracles" aren't as common these days as they were a hundred years ago. Austin was the birthplace of at least one of these miracles--the Microbe Killer--invented by William Radam. This was during the 1880s, while the Prussian immigrant was running a feed store and successful commercial nursery. It was not an easy task. Radam suffered from a variety of ailments, and his health was generally poor. He sought cures everywhere, experiencing the successive failures of other folks' miracles. Then Radam flashed on something: if he was smart enough to invent substances that killed blight, fungi, and microbes on his plants without killing the plants, he could surely do the same thing to the "minute but evil creatures" torturing him. After a year of experimenting, Radam had his Microbe Killer and it was patented in 1886.

. He drank large doses of the Microbe Killer for six months, by which time he felt and proclaimed himself a new man. Naturally, Radam felt that if it had cured him, the Microbe Killer could certainly do the same for the rest of mankind, ridding the world of most all its diseases, inconsequential and otherwise. By 1890 the Killer was being made in a string of factories that stretched from coast to coast. It cost 5 cents a gallon to make and sold for 53 cents a jug. No lot was ever exactly the same, but one analyst found a batch to be 99 percent water, a little red wine, and dashes of hydrochloric and sulfuric acids.

The jugs were numbered No 1 , No 2, and No 3, for the different strengths of the medicine. An original paper labeled jug shows directions as follows:

No 1. : 'for all diseases of a chronic but not malignant character, take a wineglass four times a day, one-half hour before or after each meal and on retirement at night.' No 2: is a stronger medicine than No 1 and is intended for patients of stronger constitution. It should be taken the same as No. 1'. No 3 : 'is a very strong medicine and is intended to give quick relief in malignant, very painful and dangerous diseases, where quick action is necessary to save life or relieve the patient from great pain. These can be taken in any quantity!!'

Radam due to his Microbe killer empire was able to move into a mansion on New York's Central Park, where he died in luxury in 1902. While in Austin, Radam built the Koppel Building at 322 Congress in 1888. He is buried in Austin's Oakwood Cemetery.

Note: there was a recent Microbe Killer jug sold o Ebay that was marked on the bottom in raised letters 'Minnesota Stoneware Co/ Red Wing, Minn.' It is unknown if all the jugs were made in the same place. Obviously, unsigned examples would be hard to place as to the pottery they were made in. So much for HISTORY.

Thanks to :

John Delmolino
North Hadley Antiques
399 River Drive
Hadley, MA. 01035

Submited by: Craig Fyock

Ant Saucers

(or more commonly known as Ant Traps)

In "The One Hundred Years of Texas Pottery" by Lonnie Byrd there is a reprint of the 1926 Athens Pottery catalog. Page two has the Ant Saucers pictured and described as;

"Ant Saucers

(For Table Legs)

put water between the inner and

outer rim and ants wont cross

Price 0.12"

I have talked to others who have said that kerosene was also used instead of water. Today ant traps will sell for between $15-$45 each and a full set (seldom found in matching sets) will sell for as high as $500

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What Is It