Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library

Cooler or Bowl "Masonic Fair"
1894-1901
White's Pottery or the Central New York Pottery
USA: New York, Utica
Stoneware
overall: 11"h x 19-1/4"dia.
Museum Purchase through the Special Acquisitions Fund and the Generosity of Maureen Harper, Patricia Loiko, and Hilary Anderson Stelling in Memory of Jill Aszling
2023.001

Footed circular salt-glazed stoneware bowl. Gray with colbalt decoration. Decorated with three large shields enclosing the legend "Masonic / Fair". Bows with hanging foliage/berries between the shields, patterns on body, rim, and foot.

In the late 1800s, White’s Pottery of Utica, New York, (also called the Central New York Pottery) created this substantial stoneware vessel. The words “Masonic Fair” highlighted with cobalt blue are impressed in three places within shield-shaped cartouches on the sides of the object. At first glance, this large vessel—over a foot and half wide—looks like a punch bowl. It is, instead, a root beer cooler, likely part of a set that once included coordinating mugs. The mold for this vessel was first used to create a design marketed by a druggist and entrepreneur named Charles Ellis Bardwell marked “Bardwell’s Root Beer.” Bardwell sold his “Unparalleled Root Beer” recipe, mugs, and coolers to fellow druggists for use at their fountain counters. A member of Mount Holyoke Lodge in South Hadley Falls, Massachusetts, Bardwell may have offered coolers customized with the words “Masonic Fair” to be used either to serve refreshments or to be offered as prizes at fundraisers for Masonic organizations.