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THE HISTORY OF THE W. NELSON McCOY'S BLUE BIRD POTTERY [Revised July 2008] By Dewayne Imsand

An Old "Blue Bird" Pot Shop

W. Nelson McCoy was born in 1820, in what is now called West Virginia. In January 1848, he and his wife Ester arrived in Ohio’s, Muskingum County, Springfield Township, in a community called Putnam. At that time, Putnam was a suburb of Zanesville, but in 1872, it became incorporated into Zanesville.

During the same year as W. Nelson and his wife arrived in Putnam, they had a son whose name was James W. Years later he would go on to establish a well-known pottery, the J.W. McCoy Pottery.

W. Nelson came to Putnam as a farmer. He acquired some land and built a house. In addition to farming, he also built a small, log building to produce stoneware during the warmer months. The pottery was a small, “Blue Bird” type shop, which was like the ones many of the farmers had at the time. It was primitive in its equipment, and the ware it produced was rough and unfinished. Although during that period, most of the home-owned, “Bluebird” shops operated under primitive conditions.

W. Nelson probably only produced pottery for only a few years, not eight as previously believed. In January 1853, a notice was published in the Zanesville Daily Courier stating that a partnership that W. Nelson had with Jeremiah Elder was dissolved. The partnership was in a Putnam grocery store, named Elder & McCoy, which had been established at some uncertain prior time.

On the same date that W. Nelson ended his partnership with Elder, a second notice was published reporting that he had taken another partner, Norman Dodge, in the grocery business. W. Nelson had bought out Elder, and the name of the grocery was changed to McCoy & Dodge.

Considering his job at the grocery, and the labor involved in farming, maintaining his household, supplying clay and firewood for his kiln, one would imagine that W. Nelson only had a small amount of time for actual pottery production. Surely, the volume he produced was small, and it was undoubtedly unmarked, since none that is attributable to him has ever been found. Some time later W. Nelson acquired the major share in the Benjamin & Co., a grocery and dry goods business. The name of the store was then changed to McCoy - Benjamin & Company. Besides W. Nelson, the owners of the store were James Benjamin and Hugh McDonald. In addition to the operation of the store itself, James Benjamin had other interests; he was also a wholesale dealer in stoneware. The newspaper Zanes Times Signal carried article in 1957 by Norris F. Schneider, who, quoting old sources, said that during the 1870’s Benjamin was one of the three major stoneware wholesalers in the region. The other major stoneware wholesalers at the time were J.C. Gillespie, and Hudson C. Ward.