In the summer of 1934, an Illinois brickyard put a whole working pottery on the Chicago lakefront — clay tanks, a tunnel kiln, a thrower at a wheel, and two of the most important potters in America demonstrating in a courtyard out back. Ninety years later, the only thing that ties a surviving pot to that building is a scrap of foil the size of a postage stamp.
The short version
- Haeger did not send an exhibit to the fair. It sent a factory. The Dundee, Illinois company built its own pavilion with a complete production line inside, fired the ware on site in a gas tunnel kiln built for the job, and sold what came out of it in an adjoining showroom.
- The headline attraction was not Haeger. Maria and Julian Martinez of San Ildefonso Pueblo worked in the building all season. The fair souvenir handout billed them first and the machinery second.
- A Royal Haeger mark rules a piece out. The Royal Haeger line arrived at the end of the decade. Nothing sold at the 1934 fair left the building wearing it.
- The identifier is a paper or foil label, and it falls off. Most fair pieces are ordinary Haeger shapes in ordinary Haeger glazes. Take the label away and there is frequently nothing left to prove where the pot was standing in August 1934.
- A hand-lettered old english monogram is the scarcest thing in the category. A sculptor named John Prasuhn decorated pottery inside the building and signed pieces with old english initials — the only on-site personalization anyone has documented.
On this page
What Haeger built on the lakefront
A Century of Progress ran two summers on 427 acres of made land in Burnham Park, opening May 27, 1933 and closing October 31, 1934, with a winter in between. The theme was printed on everything: Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms. Corporations took the invitation literally and built pavilions that were less display case than demonstration — assembly lines, laboratories, rooms where the product was visibly being made while you stood there.
Haeger's contribution was among the most literal of all. The company put up a low white building with three mural panels across the front and its name in block letters above them, and it filled the inside with a functioning pottery.
Where the pictures and the paper come from
The photograph above is not ours. It comes from the Century of Progress Records held by Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Illinois at Chicago, through Explore Chicago Collections — the surviving institutional record of the exposition, and the reason anything about that summer can be checked at all.
The Haeger paper reproduced further down is not ours either. The souvenir sheet handed out inside the building, the biographical notice on Jonathan Bowne Hunt and the newspaper clipping on John Prasuhn all reached us through collectors in two Facebook groups, Haeger Pottery Enthusiasts and Royal Haeger Pottery Collectors. Haeger kept no public archive of its own and the company is gone, so those two groups are where this company's ephemera actually survives — found, photographed and posted by people doing it for nothing. Both are open, and both are better than any reference book on this pottery.
The murals over the door are worth a minute, because they are the company's thesis statement. The left panel shows Pueblo women handling large painted jars. The center panel is a machine — a press with HAEGER cast into the housing, a plain vase riding out of it. The right panel returns to hand work, two figures at wheels shaping and painting. Ancient on one side, modern on the other, and the company's name on the mechanism in the middle.
How a brickyard reached the World's Fair
David H. Haeger, a German immigrant, bought into the Dundee brickyard on the Fox River in 1871 and owned it outright within about a year. The timing was almost comic: the Great Chicago Fire burned that October, the city needed masonry it could not easily burn down again, and Haeger spent the next decades shipping brick into the rebuild.
Flowerpots for florists came first, before the founder's death in 1900. His son Edmund H. Haeger pushed further, introducing glazed artware in 1912 and hiring a ceramic engineer named J. Martin Stangl in 1914 to develop it. The house style got settled early and never really moved: glaze and form carry the piece, and applied decoration mostly stays away. That is still the fastest way to recognize Haeger across sixty years of production — and when the glaze is not enough, the letter and number on the base are, which our guide to Haeger marks and model numbers works through line by line.
By 1933 the company was doing teaware, luncheonware and artware, and it was ambitious enough to want the lakefront. Edmund built the fair pavilion as a complete working ceramic factory showing both ancient and contemporary methods of production, with the pieces made on site sold in an adjoining showroom. Company accounts say his daughter Barbara lived in the building and worked there for the run of the fair.
The forty million problem
A claim circulates that more than forty million people watched Haeger make pottery at the fair. It cannot be right. Total paid admissions for both seasons combined were 48,469,227, and the 1934 season alone drew 16,486,377. The figure that survives in the company histories is more than four million visitors to the Haeger exhibition — roughly one fairgoer in four during the 1934 run, which is a remarkable number and does not need inflating.
Who actually made pottery in the building
Here is the part most descriptions leave out. The star turn inside the Haeger building was not Haeger.
Maria Martinez of San Ildefonso Pueblo — written Marie in the fair's own literature, as she signed her work in that period — demonstrated there throughout the 1934 season with her husband Julian. They are the couple credited with reviving and perfecting the black-on-black pottery of the Rio Grande pueblos, and by 1934 she was already among the best known artists in the country. On September 7, 1934, during Indian Day ceremonies at the fair, she received the Indian Council Fire achievement medal, awarded for the outstanding achievement of an Indian. A photograph of her holding it survives in the University of Illinois Chicago collections, with a period caption describing her as the most artistic maker of Indian pottery.
The handout given to visitors devotes its first three paragraphs to her before it mentions a machine. Julian is credited by name for the painting, done with a brush cut from yucca and the juice of the bee weed. The pottery, the text says, was fired under dried cow dung and cedar chips, then smothered with ashes for six hours to bring up the black.
Two other names belong in the building.
Jonathan Bowne Hunt (1876–1943) demonstrated at the wheel for Haeger. He was born in Flemington, New Jersey, at the site of the Fulper Pottery, trained there, worked at Rookwood in Cincinnati and at the Orlando Potteries in Florida, and in 1928 replaced Joseph Meyer as master potter at Newcomb Pottery in New Orleans when Meyer's eyesight failed. He spent six years at Newcomb. Afterward he traveled the country as a consultant and demonstrator and finished his career as designer-craftsman at Broadmoor Pottery in Denver, where he died in 1943. In other words, the man throwing pots for a crowd in Chicago had run the wheel at two of the most serious art potteries in America.
John G. Prasuhn, an Indianapolis sculptor long resident in Chicago and formerly attached to the Field Museum, turned up at the fair and left with a new career. He had sculpted Maria Martinez from life before, and ran into her and Julian working as the chief attraction of the Haeger pottery section. He started decorating pottery for Haeger on the spot. In his own words, he knew nothing about pottery, blundered into a style of decoration people liked, monogrammed pieces with old english letters, and stayed busy through the fair and for a month after it closed.
That last detail has a practical consequence. If you ever meet a Haeger piece of this period hand-monogrammed with an old english initial, you are probably looking at Prasuhn's work — a scarce thing, and the closest the fair came to producing a personalized souvenir.
What the building was really arguing
Read the handout straight through and the structure is unmistakable. Three paragraphs on Maria and Julian making pottery by hand as their ancestors did, then a pivot sentence — And now we turn to the modern methods of pottery making, with the many machines of 1934 creating beauty from a lump of clay — and then the blungers and filter presses. Two of the most accomplished ceramic artists working in America were placed in an Indian Patio at the back of an industrial pavilion and framed as the before picture. Name it plainly, because the objects themselves do not say it and the descriptions attached to them never will.
How the ware was made, step by step
The souvenir sheet handed out in the building, The Story of Pottery, is the best surviving description of what a visitor actually watched. The sequence below is taken from it. One of the surviving sheets is inscribed in ink across the top: Century of Progress, Chicago, Illinois, August 20, 1934, Haeger Pottery Bldg., and signed Vera.
- Blunger. Clay went into a blunger and was stirred with water until thoroughly liquid.
- Screen and filter press. The slip was screened through a fine sieve and pumped into a filter press, which squeezed the surplus water out and delivered the clay in large cakes.
- Pug mill. The cakes went through a pug mill, which mixed the clay and delivered it ready for the thrower and the presser.
- Casting, jiggering, pressing. Clay meant for plaster molds was thinned back to a liquid with just the required amount of water. Visitors could watch molds being filled, flat ware shaped on a jigger wheel, and other pieces pressed in molds.
- The tunnel kiln. Dried ware went through a gas-fired continuous circular tunnel kiln designed especially for the 1934 fair. Firing temperature: 1,960 degrees.
- Glaze and second fire. The biscuit was glazed — the handout calls this the step that demands the most chemistry, since the glaze has to fit the body and the color has to be worth looking at — and fired again.
- The wheel. And then the thrower, working a lump of clay on a whirling disc into a shape, to be dried, glazed and fired like everything else.
A continuous circular tunnel kiln is the detail that gives the game away about what this building was for. A circular tunnel kiln is a production machine: ware enters, travels a ring through rising and falling heat, and comes out finished, without the kiln ever cooling. Nobody builds one to demonstrate a craft. They built one because they intended to make and sell real quantities of pottery on the fairgrounds for six months.
How to tell a real fair piece
This is where the category gets difficult, and where honesty is inconvenient. Haeger did not, so far as any evidence we can find shows, apply a permanent backstamp commemorating the fair. What identifies a fair piece is applied paper or foil — and applied paper comes off in a dishpan.
The label is a small rectangle of gold foil or paper, printed 1934 above the exposition emblem, and it is usually stuck on the side or the shoulder of the pot rather than the base — it was meant to be seen on a shelf in a showroom, not hidden underneath. Half an inch of foil is the entire provenance of the object.
Have one with the label still on?
There is no photograph of a labeled fair piece on this page, and that is deliberate. We do not own one, and we would rather not borrow somebody else's picture to illustrate the point.
If you have a 1934 Haeger piece with the foil or paper label intact, a square daylight photograph of the label and a second of the base would make this guide materially better, and you would be credited by name. The same goes for anything hand-monogrammed with an old english initial — that is the scarcest thing described anywhere on this page, and we have never seen one photographed.
- Find the label, and photograph it before you do anything else. It is the primary evidence and it may not survive the next owner. Shoot it square, in daylight.
- Check the base for what is not there. The word ROYAL on a base rules the piece out entirely. So does a mold number in a series the company did not use until later. A plain HAEGER mark, an impressed number, or nothing at all are all consistent with 1934.
- Judge the glaze against the era. The matte and satin glazes, the agates, the soft single colors: those are the 1930s Haeger vocabulary. High-gloss drip glazes over textured bodies belong to the postwar decades and to a different guide.
- Expect an ordinary shape. The fair line was regular Haeger production run through a kiln that happened to sit in Burnham Park. A globe vase, a small ashtray, a two-handled vase. What is uncommon is the label, not the form.
- Treat an old english monogram as a good sign. Hand-lettered initials in an old english face point to Prasuhn's decorating bench at the fair. Uncommon, and the only widely attested piece of on-site personalization.
- Separate the pot from the paperwork. A piece with a label, kept with the handout, the ticket stub or a family note is a documented object. A piece with a label alone is a good object. A piece with neither is a nice 1930s vase, and should be described as one.
The trap in this category
Loose foil labels of this era are plentiful, and glue takes ten seconds. The label is simultaneously the only identifier and the easiest thing on the object to add. So read it the way you would read a decal on a piece of mission oak furniture: check whether it has aged into the surface it sits on, whether the adhesive halo matches the label footprint, and whether it is placed where the factory would have placed it. A crisp label on a worn pot is the thing to doubt.
The look-alikes and the loose claims
Most of what gets described as 1934 Haeger is not deliberately dishonest. It is somebody repeating what a shape book or a previous owner told them, and the vocabulary of the category does the rest.
| What it is | How it fools you | What settles it |
|---|---|---|
| Ordinary 1930s Haeger, no label | Correct company, correct decade, correct glaze family. Frequently the identical mold. | No label, no documentation. It is a 1930s Haeger vase. That is the whole claim it can support. |
| Royal Haeger, any date | Same company, same town, and the word Haeger in the mark. | The Royal line arrived at the end of the 1930s, after the fair. ROYAL on the base puts the piece after 1934. |
| Other potteries' fair souvenirs | Century of Progress labels and transfers were applied by many makers and jobbers. A blue souvenir vase with the fair emblem is not automatically Haeger. | Find a Haeger mark or a Haeger mold number. The fair emblem identifies the event, not the factory. |
| 1933-season souvenirs | The fair ran two summers, and both years' merchandise reads Century of Progress. | The evidence we have places the Haeger building and its tunnel kiln in the 1934 season. A 1933-dated label is not a Haeger building piece. |
| Pueblo-style pottery sold at the fair | Maria and Julian Martinez worked in this building, so anything blackware near a Haeger story acquires a glow. | Signed San Ildefonso blackware is its own field with its own experts. Do not let a Haeger label get anywhere near attributing a piece to Maria Martinez. |
The mechanics here are the same ones we found with the California job case: when the object is common and the story is scarce, the story does all the work, and nothing about the object pushes back. It is also why the Rookwood dating system is such a luxury by comparison. Rookwood put the year on the bottom. Haeger, in 1934, put it on a sticker.
Verified, and not verified
- Verified: the fair dates and attendance, from the exposition record. The existence and character of the Haeger building, from the Century of Progress Records at the University of Illinois at Chicago and from the company's own souvenir handout. Every production step in the how-it-was-made section, quoted from that handout. Maria Martinez's Council Fire medal of September 7, 1934, from a period photograph caption in the UIC collections.
- Reported, not independently verified: the four-million-plus figure for visitors to the Haeger exhibition, and the account of Edmund Haeger's daughter Barbara living in the building, both from published company histories rather than from fair records we could read. The identification of the ceramic engineer J. Martin Stangl hired in 1914 with the Stangl of Stangl Pottery is widely stated and we have not confirmed it here.
- Conflicting: the year the Royal Haeger line launched. Sources give 1938 and 1939, and the date Royal Hickman was hired is given variously as 1934 and the late 1930s. Both readings put the Royal line after the fair, which is the only thing this guide needs from them. The biographical notice on Jonathan Bowne Hunt gives his Haeger demonstrations as 1934–35, which runs past the fair closing date; the extra season may refer to work back at Dundee.
- Not verified: the mural panels, which we have matched to the building photograph by subject and arrangement rather than by a document naming them, and whose own source we have not established.
Fair Haeger hides behind at least four different phrasings — Century of Progress, World's Fair, 1934 Chicago, and plain Haeger with the label mentioned three lines down in the description. A piece described one way will never surface in a search worded another. Our free sourcing dashboard runs one search term across more than twenty vintage marketplaces at once.
Search Haeger Century of Progress Search Haeger 1934 World's FairThe souvenir and the pot
There is a particular kind of object that carries far more history than it looks like it should, and fair Haeger is the clean case. The clay is the same clay. The glaze came out of the same bucket as a thousand others. The mold was in use before the fair opened and stayed in use after it closed. What the visitor carried home, and what a collector is still after, is a half hour of standing in a white building on the lakefront watching a wheel turn — and a piece of foil small enough to cover with a thumb, which is all that is left of the half hour.
The building came down with the rest of the fair. The tunnel kiln, built for one summer, was scrapped. Haeger went home to Dundee, hired Royal Hickman at the end of the decade, opened a second plant in Macomb, and spent the next seventy years becoming the company most people mean when they say midcentury American pottery. It closed in 2016, after 145 years.
What survives from the summer of 1934 is a scatter of small vases and ashtrays, most of them stripped of the one thing that identified them. If you find one with the label on, leave it alone. Do not wash it, do not tidy the edges, do not lift it to see what is underneath. It is the most fragile part of the object and the only part that is rare.
Sources
- Century of Progress Records, 1927–1952, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago Library — the source of the photograph of the Haeger Pottery building reproduced at the top of this guide, and the operating records of the exposition generally. Reached through Explore Chicago Collections; the collection runs to 80.5 linear feet and is catalogued as COP10.
- The Haeger collector groups on Facebook — Haeger Pottery Enthusiasts and Royal Haeger Pottery Collectors. The Story of Pottery souvenir sheet, the Jonathan Bowne Hunt biographical notice and the John Prasuhn newspaper clipping reproduced above were found, photographed and shared by members of these two groups. That material is their work, not ours. Both are open and active, and they are the best place to ask about a piece or a document that is not covered here.
- The Story of Pottery, souvenir sheet issued in the Haeger Pottery building, Chicago Century of Progress, 1934, inscribed in ink August 20, 1934 and signed Vera — the production sequence from blunger to second firing, the circular gas tunnel kiln built for the 1934 fair and its 1,960-degree firing temperature, the account of Marie and Julian Martinez in the Indian Patio, and the footer reading Haeger Pottery, Factory at Dundee, Ill.
- 1934 Chicago World's Fair in Technicolor: Century of Progress International Exposition, PeriscopeFilm — archival color footage of the 1934 season, embedded above.
- Haeger Pottery Plant, Dundee Township Historic District — photograph of the East Dundee plant, taken August 9, 2007 by G LeTourneau and released under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Reproduced unaltered.
- UIC Digital Collections — Pueblo Indian woman with a 1934 Council Fire medal, Kaufmann and Fabry Co., 1934 — Marie Martinez with the medal awarded September 7, 1934 during Indian Day ceremonies at the fair, for the outstanding achievement of an Indian.
- Explore Chicago Collections — Artist's sketch of Haeger Pottery building at the Century of Progress International Exposition, 1933–1934, Kaufmann and Fabry Co., University of Illinois at Chicago Library. A separate item from the photograph above.
- Century of Progress Collection, 1928–1934, Special Collections, Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago Public Library — artifacts, brochures, guides, photographs, postcards, scrapbooks and souvenirs. Century of Progress International Exposition Publications, 1933–1934, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library — 22 boxes of guidebooks, pamphlets and brochures distributed by exhibiting corporations. These are where the surviving paper trail for exhibitor pavilions sits.
- A Century of Progress International Exposition — May 27 to October 31, 1933 and May 26 to October 31, 1934; 22,565,859 paid admissions in 1933 and 16,486,377 in 1934, 48,469,227 across both seasons; 427 acres of Burnham Park; the theme Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.
- Haeger Industries Inc., International Directory of Company Histories — the 1871 purchase of the Dundee brickyard, flowerpots before 1900, glazed artware in 1912, ceramic engineer J. Martin Stangl hired 1914, more than four million visitors to the Haeger exhibition at the 1934 fair, the Southwest Indian potters as the popular attraction, Joseph F. Estes and the hiring of Royal Hickman, and the Macomb plant.
- Haeger Potteries — the brickyard origin on the Fox River, the working ceramic factory at the 1934 exposition where souvenir pottery was made, Royal Arden Hickman and the Royal Haeger line, the 1941 stalking panther, and the closure announced April 6, 2016 after 145 years.
- The History of Haeger Pottery, Part One: Dundee and Macomb — Edmund H. Haeger's complete working ceramic factory at the exposition showing ancient and contemporary methods, the pieces made on site sold in an adjoining showroom, and his daughter Barbara living and working in the building for the run of the fair.
- Lindsay Fullerton — Maria Martinez at A Century of Progress — the standalone Haeger building, the working kiln and staff producing Century of Progress souvenirs on site, Maria and Julian Martinez demonstrating through the 1934 season, and the Indian Council Fire achievement award.
- Biographical notice, Jonathan Bowne Hunt (1876–1943), with a photograph dated December 1, 1937 at Broadmoor Pottery, Denver, credited to the Niehaus Collection — Flemington birth at the Fulper site, Rookwood and Orlando Potteries, master potter at Newcomb from 1928 replacing Joseph Meyer, and demonstrating for Haeger Potteries at the Century of Progress.
- Newspaper clipping, undated, headed Working in New Field — John G. Prasuhn, Indianapolis sculptor formerly of the Field Museum, decorating pottery for Haeger after meeting Marie and Julian Martinez, who were the chief attraction of the Haeger pottery section, and his old english monograms.
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