Durable and inexpensive salt-glazed stoneware decorated with cobalt oxide blue slip was made in most parts of New England. The production of commercial stonewares increased as commerce and the Industrial Revolution brought about the wider processing and distribution of foodstuffs, spirits, and agricultural goods. Manufacturers up and down the East Coast placed orders for stoneware jars, bottles, jugs, and larger open-mouthed crocks, and many potteries offered to customize orders with the names of enterprises, various decorative advertising and ornamental patterns, or scenes such as that decorating this large snuff container.

Research into manufacturing potteries in Boston has revealed no such pottery operating under this name or at this address during the nineteenth century. Therefore, it is assumed that the inscribed company of "Clark Brewer and Son" was a dry-goods merchant or tobacco shop at the address, and that this crock was a custom-designed advertising fixture for the retailing of snuff within that establishment. Rappee snuff was a dark, pungent, finely ground mixed snuff, also known as Cavendish or Indian weed, and was manufactured in the West Indies, England, and Holland, as well as America. Functioning much like the fabled "cigar store Indian," this crock's decorative scene depicts a Native American chief in full regalia offering tobacco in both its raw and its processed state. Large in scale, this scene, perhaps of the legendary Seminole chief Osceola, would have been a curiosity drawing attention to the store and its contents.

Examples of nineteenth-century American commercial stonewares with detailed, intricately incised sgraffito decoration on a large scale are quite rare, and few of this quality are known to survive. Its size, with a capacity of more than one hundred dry pints, as well as its finely executed decoration and glaze, suggest the work of a skilled potter, whose identity remains unknown.

Jack L. Lindsey, "Storage Jar or Crock," in Stacy C. Hollander, American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with American Folk Art Museum, 2001), 429.