I haven’t found much information on the La Cañada Pottery yet. In fact, I don’t seem to see that much of it around at all - I believe it was always a smaller operation so there may not be as much of it around. Plus, they only produced pottery up until the 50s.

One of the most interesting things is that, as far as I know they were not based in the city of La Cañada Flintridge (located where the 2 Fwy hits the 210 Fwy). Jack Chipman’s book has them located in Newhall to start with, which is close to current day Six Flags Magic Mountain. They later moved to Apple Valley which is very interesting to me because I grew up visiting that area when it was completely undeveloped. We used to take dirt bikes out there on the holidays. I wonder if their plant could be tracked down one of these days. It’s unclear when exactly they stopped producing, though it was probably in the 50s.

The pottery was started up by J.M. Roberts in the 30s. The few pieces I’ve seen have a very rustic, handmade look to them. They made dinnerware, kitchen items and gardenware. Most of their items have solid color, interesting glazes and are not decorated with patterns. A very popular form and one of the most common that we’ve seen are low flower bowls. The one that I found below is a circular low bowl with a white exterior and light pinkish maroon interior.

Sometimes these have pieces such as flowers that were attached later on, or the edges of the bowls were manipulated to form decorative elements. They are very reminiscient of Haldeman bowls of the same era - indeed it was said that La Cañada shared facilities with the Haldeman Pottery at one point in time.

Some of their items do not have any identifying marks, but many are marked with a handwritten “La Cañada Handmade”. We recently (2008) saw a wonderful maroon pitcher and creamer / sugar set made by La Cañada - they had a sort of rough, handmade but fluid look. I actually want to say they reminded me a lot of some of the earlier Brayton Laguna pieces.

Note: We've tried to provide as much info as possible on this pottery maker or artist. For further info, you may want to research the items they have on Ebay listed under this name. We've tried to hand tailor the searches below so they will bring up the most accurate results. If there are no results, it will list general California pottery.