Order Inquiry: Cook Pottery Company

Every so often a box of ephemera will turn up a card which leads to, and becomes a part of, an interesting story. This is the “story” of one such card.

This postal card, postmarked May 11, 1909, was mailed from the purchasing department of the Brooklyn, N.Y., plant of the H.W. Johns-Manville Company to inquire as to the status of their order to the Cook Pottery Company, and is stamped “Ans. / May 13, 1909 / W. E. Green” to note that a reply had been made to that inquiry.

Order Inquiry from H.W. Johns-Manville Company to Cook Pottery Company.
Author’s collection.

Henry Ward Johns established the H.W. Johns Manufacturing Company is 1858 and Charles B. Manville established the Manville Covering Company in 1886. The two firms merged in 1901 to form the H.W. Johns-Manville Company which was primarily engaged in the mining, manufacturing, and supply of asbestos fibers and products.

The Cook Pottery Company was organized in 1894, succeeding the business of Ott & Brewer which operated the Etruria Pottery. All three proprietors—Charles Howell Cook, Joseph Ott, and John Hart Brewer—are interred here at Riverview Cemetery.

But what of W. E. Green? That would be William Edgar Green and his obituary in the Trenton Evening Times of February 18, 1930, recounts a remarkable career.

Green was born on January 28, 1878, the son of Elmer Ewing Green (1850-1909) and Sue Elizabeth Hunt Green (1850-1920), and grandson of Caleb Smith Green (1819-1891) and Eleanor Graeme Ewing Green (1816-1901). He received his early schooling at the New Jersey State Model School in Trenton and prepared for college at the Lawrenceville School, whereupon he entered Princeton University in 1898, graduating in the Class of 1902.

He went to work in Cook’s Etruria Pottery as a shipping clerk and as he gained experience in the details of the pottery business, he was promoted to manager of the electrical department of Cook’s Prospect Hill Pottery. He was elected assistant treasurer of the Cook Pottery Company in 1909.

Upon his father’s death he was elected to succeed him as a director of the Trenton Banking Company and after the resignation of John A. Campbell as the bank’s president he was chosen his successor. In addition, he was the treasurer of the United New Jersey Railroad and Canal Company, and a director of the Delaware and Bound Brook Railroad Company, New Jersey Bell Telephone Company, Hotel Realty Company, Prudential Life Insurance Company, and Trenton Mortgage and Title Guarantee Company.

Green was “a man of quiet habits and simple tastes,” the newspaper noted, and in his final hours he requested that no mourning drapes be displayed at the bank. He died at his home on February 18, 1930, and was interred in his grandfather’s family plot in Riverview Cemetery.

Family plot of Caleb Smith Green at Riverview Cemetery, Trenton, New Jersey.

Grave marker for William Edgar Green.

A simple postal card. A lot of history.