I signed up for the Rookwood Pottery Tour – which takes place on Fridays through December 20. I’d previously been on their Queen City Underground tour and had a blast. The Rookwood tour started at Findlay Market. Our guide gave us a bit of the history of OTR and Findlay Market.
Then we headed out towards the Rookwood factory with stops along the way for history. One stop was the Rhinegeist Brewery – it’s in the original Moerlein brewery. They have a tap room that we have now added to our list of “things to do” in Cincinnati.
We made it to the Rookwood factory and saw a gorgeous mural painted by the folks at ArtWorks. There are 67 murals around our city from ArtWorks!
Once inside, our guide told us the history of the Rookwood company – which involves many of Cincinnati’s “royalty”. There’s marriage, bankruptcy and everything in between! Once we knew the history, we started the tour and saw each of the steps to making this beautiful pottery.
After seeing all the phases (some of which I couldn’t photograph) – we headed into the showroom to check out the finished products. This beautiful vase was hand painted by a local artist – there are a series of them – and they’re only $7500 a piece! (oye!)
Rookwood Pottery is known for it’s perfection and for it’s durability. It’s really exquisitely made. They don’t take shortcuts – and you can tell. The pottery for sale ranges from $20+ – so there really is something for every price range.
Lastly – we saw the Rookwood Fireplace they recently installed. The price tag on this – oh it STARTS at $100K. Nice to know they included a drunk wiener dog in it – haha!
Rookwood Pottery really is amazing stuff – it’s definitely something to aspire to. I know a lot of homes in Cincinnati have Rookwood Fireplaces – it’s fun to find out the history behind something so unique and beautiful in our city. We’re very lucky this is still here and wasn’t bought up by someone that didn’t care as much about the quality (it almost happened!).
The Rookwood tour is going on through December 20 – but if you can’t make that – no worries – American Legacy Tours has holiday tours and a brewery bus tour coming up! Check out all their tours at their site AmericanLegacyTours.com.
As the title states – this is Part One! For Part Two – we’ll visit another Rookwood landmark in the city…and boy am I hungry (hint hint).
Disclosure: American Legacy Tours provided me two tickets for this tour but all of the opinions are my own.
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