If you stand in the front yard of East Amwell School and look south, down the driveway of the now horse farm and up the side of the hill to what was known as Dawlis Mills, you can see the area of where the colonial Ringoes Pottery once flourished. In 1913 the Hunterdon County Democrat records a story of how the landowner, D.V. Hill wanted to flatten out an earthen mound in his field. When he started digging, the mound was found to contain thousands of pottery shards and the foundation of the long gone Ringoes Pottery.
This colonial pottery was run by three generations of the Kemple family — father John Kemple, son Phillip and later grandson Hanteel Kemple — from roughly 1724 to 1798. The Kemples were farmers but had the pottery as a side business and produced local redware utilitarian pottery. These items included crocks, jars, pans, jugs, tankards mugs, pitchers, plates and bowls.
C.W. Larison wrote in his pamphlet Ancient Amwell of the existence of a pottery and an adjoining brickyard. Interestingly in the 1930’s amateur archeologist Robert Sims made the first systematic excavation of the site and discovered the pottery kiln and adjacent dump site. Fragments he recovered were exhibited in 1956 at a pottery exhibit at the New Jersey State Museum and later added to its permanent collection. The last archeological dig on the site occurred in 1976 when the property was owned by the Drake family. This dig also yielded thousands of fragments.
The typical pottery produced by the Kemples was red earthenware and brown and grey salt glazed stoneware. Pottery of this type was found at the Clawson House during the archeological dig there during the summers of 2005 and 2006. The Ringoes Pottery ended when the entire Kemple family moved to Pennsylvania. Every once and a while someone shows off a piece of china marked “Ringoes Pottery.” Unfortunately this was produced by someone in the 1950s and is no relation to the colonial pottery.
— Jim Davidson