Crown Lynn - Early History

Early History

The pottery's origins started with an 1854 land purchase at Hobsonville, near Auckland, by Rice Owen Clark, who had arrived in New Zealand thirteen years before. He had worked as a school teacher in Wellington and as a clerk in Auckland before achieving his ambition to work the land. To drain his land, he made his own pipes by wrapping logs with clay and firing them with charcoal, which led to his making pipes for his neighbours. Clark's success with pipe making led to other small companies in the area forming an industry, merging in 1929 to become the Amalgamated Brick and Pipe Company.

Tom Clark, one of Rice Owen Clark's great-grandsons, began working in the firm during the depression. He was responsible for the plant expanding in 1937 to produce items unrelated to the building trade such as electrical insulation equipment and moulds for rubber products such as gloves, baby bottle teats and condoms. Clark was an employer who always encouraged his staff to experiment with new products. As a result, an oil-fired continuous tunnel kiln was built in 1941, and tableware manufacture began the following year. The company had established a research department in 1938 to investigate the viability of producing tableware from New Zealand clays.

Read more about this topic:  Crown Lynn

Famous quotes containing the words early and/or history:

    Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.
    Billy Wilder (b. 1906)

    If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.
    Albert Camus (1913–1960)