Anna Pottery Temperance Movement Snake Jug By Wallace Kirkpatrick

Inherited from maternal grandparents, McNairy County, TN. In the early 60's I found the jug in my grandparents' McNairy County, Tennessee, smokehouse. It was being used to prop open the smokehouse door to allow daylight to illuminate the interior. My grandparents allowed me to take the jug to Memphis State University, where I was a student, to have someone identify it. No one at the university had seen anything like it and one professor thought it might be from South America ( I guess he did not see the English inscription ). The jug has been in my possession since that time. I remember hearing that my grandfather, born in 1882, had taken the train to the Chicago World's Fair (1893?). The Illinois Central Railway ran through Anna, Illinois, and on to Chicago. Possibly it stopped in Anna and the jug was obtained there or it may have been obtained at the World's Fair-- who knows? The jug remained a mystery until my wife's father found a 1930's magazine article about Anna Pottery and the snake jug created in honor of Thomas Nast, the political cartoonist. For a long time we were under the false impression that this was a jug that depicted the Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed. Only recently did we come to the conclusion that this jug is a "Temperance Movement" jug.