From the 1700s to the late 1800s, the pantries of many Americans doubled as galleries of unique folk art: artfully crafted, salt-glazed vessels decorated with animals, landscapes, and caricatures rendered in blue cobalt oxide. Early American stoneware, or “crocks,” was a quotidian part of everyday life, and Baltimore was an epicenter of stoneware production that shaped the technique, style, and taste of crocks throughout the Eastern Seaboard.