Laura Anne Fry was an accomplished wood carver and ceramics and china painter. She made significant contributions to the development of the Art Pottery Movement in America. At Cincinnati’s Rookwood Pottery, and later at Lonhuda Pottery Company, she developed and taught technically innovative glazing techniques, for which she received patents. When her glazing methods were used at Rookwood Pottery after she left the company, she sued for patent infringement and lost.
Martha Ann Honeywell was one of dozens of atypically figured itinerant artists and performers in the early nineteenth century. She was born with truncated arms and legs, no hands, and only one small foot with three toes. She learned to make paper cutouts and silhouettes, embroider, create waxwork, and write in miniature. Honeywell was a savvy businesswoman who for most of her career traveled alone on national and international tours earning her own living. She exhibited her works in a beautiful traveling pavilion at parades and fairs.
In 1811 Lydia Phillips took over her late husband’s bookstore and circulating library in Philadelphia. She placed an advertisement in Poulson’s Daily Advertiser asking her friends and the public for their patronage as she continued the business to support herself and six small children. Ten years later she was still in business. Scottish Rite Masonic Library in Philadelphia holds a copy of Jeremy Belknap's The History of New-Hampshire with an identical label with Phillips’ name in manuscript. M. Carey is likely Mathew Carey, Philadelphia printer and publisher.
