Rare Antique A. P. Simms Fine Whiskies Stoneware Jug Pot Natchez, Mississippi

  

SIMMS FINE WHISKIES STONEWARE JUG POT NATCHEZ, MISSISSIPPI. SUPER RARE antique mid 1800's era stoneware jug from NATCHEZ, MISS. Cream body with chocolate brown upper cone section..

Very nice solid condition with old tiny chips on the cream edge and base edge (please see photos). The size is approximately 11 1/2" tall by 7" in diameter. Dark cobalt blue painted front letters and rectangular border. TRY TO FIND THIS JUG WHICH IS NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE.

Great Southern Pottery from a very historic town! This would be a wonderful addition to your early American primitives collection. Simms Was In and Ousted in Mississippi.

Simms once was a big man in Natchez, Mississippi. He owned a furniture shore. He owned a meat market. He owned a grocery store.

He owned an express and telegraph company. He owned a saloon and a flourishing liquor business. That profited him very little when, in 1908 he was, as a Mississippi court ruled in unusually strong terms, perpetually banned from doing business in the state.

Simms early history, even his full name, is shrouded in time. One unverified report says he was born in 1840 and married a woman whose first name was Annie. He seems to have avoided census-takers much of his life.

By the time Simms enters the public record in the late 1800s he is already a thriving merchant in Natchez, Mississippi. P Simms Furniture Store, a large retail establishment that spread from 627 to 635 Franklin Street, shown here as looked in 1900. Simms also ran a meat market in Natchez, one that made news when it caught fire and burned in 1907.

For his Natchez grocery store and saloon, he issued a token worth 2 and 1/2 cents in trade. He must have kept the potters working in the Mississippi River mud very busy turning out his containers. Some look primitive, with rough exteriors and his name and Fine Whiskey stenciled in cobalt across the front. Others bear more sophisticated lettering and Albany slip brown tops on Bristol glaze bodies. Still others are totally in white Bristol glaze, with cobalt lettering.

Simms did not just practice his enterprise on the Natchez side of the Mississippi River. He also ran a saloon on the west bank, at Vidalia, Louisiana. The cross river proximity of the town is shown here.

That liquor outlet got him in trouble with the authorities in Vidalia. Simms claimed he already had a license and did not need another. He was, he said, conducting a Jim Crow saloon. The saloon was so constructed that the bartender could serve whites on one side and then step immediately around the corner to the colored bar and serve customers.

His lawyer likened the arrangement to the Jim Crow sections on railway and trolley cars. When the district court dismissed this argument and ruled for the town, Simms appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court. That body contended that the Jim Crow argument held no water. Louisiana law mandated, the court ruled, that there be separate saloons, kept in separate buildings, one from the other, i.

The white separated from the colored. A more drastic blow to Simms liquor business was to fall eight years later. The voters of Mississippi with their strong ties to the Baptist Church in 1908 voted a complete ban on the sale of alcohol throughout the state. Natchez, despite its reputation as a rip-roaring river town, was left high and very dry. Forced to shut down his saloon and liquor retail operation, he simply moved his business across the river to wet Louisiana and set up shop.

A Simms jug dated 1909, shown here, helps tells the story. Not only did Simms plan to sell whiskey in Louisiana, but also to send it into an increasingly thirsty Mississippi. Although liquor dealers often sent their products into states where liquor was banned via existing parcel companies and railway express, those conduits increasingly were being harassed by arrests and legal action from local and state authorities, despite the Interstate Commerce clause.

As a result, many carriers were refusing to carry booze into dry areas. Simms, always the entrepreneur, sought to obviate that problem byestablishing his own carrier in 1908. He called it the Simms Express & Telegraph Company. He clearly intended it to be a large operation, advertising for an electric generating plant with sufficient output to supply 250 large lights. It did not take officials in the State of Mississippi long to determine that A. And the Simms Express and Telegraph Company were attempting to skirt Prohibition laws. Simms, not one to buckle to the authorities, took the case to the Mississippi Supreme Court asking that the injunction be dissolved. The court not only disagreed, it made the injunction permanent. P Simms was finished as a whiskey man in Mississippi and faded from the public record.

Because Louisiana did not go dry until National Prohibition, he may well have continued his saloons, white and Jim Crow, in Vidalia, as well as maintaining a retail liquor trade. But in Mississippi this leading Natchez businessman had been ousted by court order.

The item "RARE ANTIQUE A. SIMMS FINE WHISKIES STONEWARE JUG POT NATCHEZ, MISSISSIPPI" is in sale since Wednesday, September 16, 2020.

This item is in the category "Antiques\Decorative Arts\Ceramics & Porcelain\Jugs". The seller is "zuniglaze" and is located in Reno, Nevada. This item can be shipped to United States.

• Featured Refinements: Antique Stoneware Jug
• Style: Americana
• Age: 1850-1899
• Material: Ceramic & Porcelain
• Original/Reproduction: Original
• Color: Brown
• Country/Region of Origin: United States