In 1748 the State of Massachusetts offered bounties to encourage the manufacture of earthen ware, and many new pot-works were established. “Mangness” for the use of potters was offered for sale in the newspapers, and the would-be purchaser was to inquire of the printer, who in colonial days seemed literally to have a finger in every pie. One of the oldest of these colonial potteries was started previous to the year 1765, by a man whose descendants of the same name still conduct the pottery works known as the factory of A. H. Hews & Co., in North Cambridge, Mass. The record of this family firm is so remarkable for America that it should be told at some length. Not only has the company continued in the same business in an uninterrupted line of the same firm name, but it possesses a record of a century and a third of unspotted integrity in business dealings. It has passed through times of foreign and civil wars, through business crises and depressions, in an even career of honor and fair-dealing, and now has earned a deserved and independent position, having the largest manufactory of flower-pots in the world—making many millions yearly—as well as a large and varied line of art pottery. When Abraham Hews was pottering around in his little pottery in Weston, in 1765, making milk-pans and bean-pots, and jugs and teapots, and exchanging them for general merchandise, in which New England rum and molasses took no inferior part, he little foresaw the vast business enterprise that would be carried out by his great-grandson in 1891. The clay used by him in Weston was brought from Watertown, and later from Cambridge, and the firm did not move their works to Cambridge until 1870. Abraham Hews, second, lived to be eighty-eight years old (being postmaster for fifty-one years), and his son lived to be eighty-one years old, dying in 1891—the good old Puritan stock showing in long life as well as in honest life. Thus does a chain of only three lives reach to ante-Revolutionary times, and an ante-Revolutionary pottery. In the _Norwich Gazette_ of September 15, 1796, we find this advertisement of a pottery: “C. Potts & Son inform the Public that they have lately established a Manufactory of Earthen ware at the shop formerly improved by Mr. Charles Lathrop, where all kinds of said Ware is made and sold either in large or small quantities, and warranted good.” This pottery was on Bean Hill. It is referred to in Miss Caulkin’s “History of Norwich,” Dr. Peters’s “History of Connecticut,” and in Morse’s _Gazetteer_.