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many as 300-400 stoneware fruit jars at a time at their pottery and,
like Arie's mother, reserved half-a-dozen or more for their own
pantry. Because of their similarity in size to glass containers,
however, fruit jars were among the first vessels to be discarded from
the potters' ware inventory.
The new glass jars began to appear in the White County area just
after 1900. They came with porcelain-lined zinc lids that were
screwed over rubber seals, an arrangement that proved easier to use
and more hygienic than the previous method. Yet several factors kept
glassware from replacing stoneware all at once. One was price: the
glass bottles were initially very expensive, at least to the upland folk
who still practiced a subsistence mode of living. Another was that only
the half-gallon botdes approximated the size of the ceramic vessels;
the rest came in half-pint, pint, and quart sizes and thus found a
different function in the kitchen.
Perhaps the most important reason for the glassware's poor initial
acceptance in the region hinged on die community's reluctance to
alter a tried-and-true way of doing things. Arie Meaders's mother,
curious by nature, bought some of the half-gallon glass jars around
1908 or 1909 and immediately set about putting up her summer fruit.
The reaction of her neighbors to the strange experiment was
immediate and pronounced, according to Arie:
I remember the first glass cans she ever bought. Well, everybody told
her, "Liddy, you're gonna get killed is what you're gonna do. You're
gonna kill your family widi diem glass cans. Why, they'll break in the
food and every one of you'll die!" "Oh," she said, "I'm not afraid of
them." And she wasn't, she went ahead and used them.
Eventually, even the faint-hearted came to accept the new containers,
and ceramic fruit jars declined to the point where they assumed only a
marginal role in farm canning.
Another way to preserve fruit was "bleaching." Apples and peaches
were commonly prepared in this manner. Washed, peeled, and
sliced, die fresh fruit was raked to the sides of a large wooden tub,
while a small stoneware vessel filled with fireplace coals was lowered
in the center. Sulfur was added to the live coals, and the whole affair
was covered widi a quilt and, over that, a length of oil cloth. After the
apples or peaches (they were never bleached together) had yellowed in
the resultant vapor, they were removed from the tub and stored eidier