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John Pott (1759–1827)

Pottsville’s founding ironmaster and namesake. Markers: ★ verified · ✔ confirmed · ✎ corrects a common error · ⚑ open/caution.

Pottsville takes its name from John Pott, the ironmaster who bought the iron furnace on this stretch of the Schuylkill and founded the town. ★ Contemporary report caught him in the act of founding: the Harrisburg Patriot of March 1825, while he still lived, described Pottsville as a village of about fifteen houses “deriv[ing] its name from its founder, Mr. John Pott.” ★ The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica records the essentials plainly: “In 1804 this furnace was purchased by John Pott (1759–1827), the founder of the borough; in 1807 coal was discovered; in 1816 the town was laid out; in 1828 it was incorporated as a borough.” ★

The ironmaster before Pottsville

Pott was a Pennsylvania-German ironmaster of Oley Township, Berks County, born into a family that had come to America in 1734 — on the ship St. Andrew out of Rotterdam, in Beers’s account — and settled in the Oley Valley. ★ His father was John Wilhelm Pott (1725–1767); his mother, Maria Hoch. ✔ In 1786 he married Maria Lesher (1768–1823), a daughter of John Lesher, the Oley ironmaster who ran the Oley Forge and Mary Ann Furnace and sat in the Pennsylvania Assembly — a marriage that tied Pott into an established Berks iron-and-politics family. ★

His own documented ironmaking began not at Pottsville but in Berks County: about 1799 he acquired the “New” District Forge in District Township, and his surviving business ledgers begin that year. ★ Those account books — four time-and- board books and a day book from the Greenwood works, and a day book from the District Forge — survive today as the “John Pott business records” at the Hagley Museum & Library, the fullest primary record of his enterprises. ★

The furnace and the founding of Pottsville

The site that became Pottsville lay in the Schuylkill Gap, where Lewis Reese and Isaac Thomas had put up a small iron furnace about 1795–96. ★ John Pott bought the Reese & Thomas furnace in 1806 — the act the county histories, and the town’s own memorial, treat as the founding of Pottsville. ✔ (The 1911 Britannica attaches a land purchase to 1804, and the full land title, descending from a 1751 warrant to Edmund Physick and patented as “Pomona” in 1788, vested in Pott by 1808 — so 1804, 1806, and 1808 all appear in the record for different steps.) ⚑ He tore the old furnace down, raised the Greenwood forge, and in 1807 built the Greenwood furnace, which he ran “until his death in 1827,” making some of the region’s early experiments with anthracite (“black rock”) as a furnace fuel. ★

The town proper he laid out in lots in 1816 — Munsell allows “1816 or 1817” — on part of the Pomona tract, the original plot running along Centre Street between Union and Race and along Mahantongo Street. ★ Coal was found here in 1807; the borough of Pottsville was chartered on February 19, 1828, a few months after Pott’s death. ★ His sons carried the iron business and the land forward: Abraham Pott went on to found neighboring Port Carbon. ✔

Family

With Maria Lesher, John Pott had nine children, a list Beers and Munsell give alike: John Jr., Magdalina, Benjamin (born June 10, 1793), James, Abraham, Mary, Catherine, William, and Jacob. ★ John Jr. superintended the furnace for his father and later ran for sheriff of the new Schuylkill County; Benjamin succeeded to the iron business and administered his father’s estate; Abraham founded Port Carbon. ✔ The family were Lutherans, though Elliott records Pott also giving ground to the town for St. Patrick’s church and for the grammar-school park. ⚑

Death, estate, and burial

John Pott died on Tuesday, October 23, 1827, at his residence near Pottsville, of a fever, aged 67. ★ The date is fixed by his obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer of October 29, 1827 — “at his residence near Pottsville, Pa. on Tuesday morning last, Mr. JOHN POTT, in the 68th year of his age … the founder and original proprietor of the town of Pottsville” — and corroborated by Munsell’s “October 23d” and the gravestone. ★ Because he had laid out town lots not yet deeded at his death, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a special act in 1828 authorizing his son Benjamin Pott, administrator, to execute the deeds; the estate’s Purpart No. 1 — the dwelling, furnace, and forge, 72½ acres valued at $23,287 — was adjudged to Benjamin. ✔

Pott was first buried in the Centre Street burying ground he had himself donated when he laid out the town — the ground beside the grammar school, cleared in 1895 when about 500 remains were reinterred, most in the Presbyterian Cemetery. ✔ A shared John-and-Maria Pott stone is recorded at Charles Baber Cemetery, near the graves of his son Benjamin (d. 1868) and Benjamin’s wife Christina; the exact path his remains took in the 1895 clearance is not fully documented. ⚑

A note on his birth year

The founder was born in Oley Township, Berks County, in 1759 — the year given by the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica (“John Pott, 1759–1827”) and by the biographical note to his own business papers at the Hagley Museum & Library. ⚑ The county’s 1916 genealogical record (Beers) instead gives 1757, and that year long stood as the local date. ✎ The contemporaneous evidence favours 1759: Pott died “in the 68th year of his age” — that is, at 67 — on October 23, 1827, which places his birth in late 1759 or 1760 and rules out 1757 (a man born in 1757 would have been in his seventieth year). ★ No baptismal record survives to fix the exact day — the Oley Reformed register begins only in 1763 — so it is the year, not the day, that the record supports. ⚑

Not the founder of Pottstown

✎ He is not the John Potts who founded Pottstown. That was a different ironmaster, John Potts (1710–1768) of Montgomery County, of an earlier generation. ★ The two are easy to merge because the name is spelled both “Pott” and “Potts” across the sources — Beers notes the family name was recorded “Potts, as the name was then” in the 1750s Berks County tax rolls — while the 1911 Britannica and Wikipedia use “Pott” and the City of Pottsville’s own history page uses “Potts.” ⚑

A granite memorial, raised in 1897, marks him downtown at the corner of Centre and Arch Streets: “John Pott / who founded / Pottsville / in the year 1806.” His town grew into the seat of Schuylkill County and a commercial center of the anthracite region — a coal-and-iron story his furnace began.

Honored on: John Pott Memorial.

Sources

Frequently asked

Who was Pottsville named for?
Pottsville is named for John Pott, an ironmaster who bought the furnace on the upper Schuylkill — the act its 1897 memorial dates to 1806 — and founded the settlement. He laid the town out in lots in 1816; it was incorporated as a borough in 1828, the year after his death.
When was John Pott born — 1757 or 1759?
The best-supported year is 1759, given by the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica and by the biographical note to his own business papers at the Hagley Museum & Library. The 1916 Beers county history gives 1757, and that date was long used locally. His contemporaneous 1827 obituary settles the question against 1757: it records him dying "in the 68th year of his age" — that is, at 67 — which places his birth in late 1759 or 1760. No baptismal record survives to fix the exact day.
Is this the same John Potts who founded Pottstown?
No. Pottstown, in Montgomery County, was founded by John Potts (1710–1768), a different ironmaster of an earlier generation. Pottsville's John Pott (1759–1827) was a Schuylkill forge owner who lived roughly half a century later. Local sources spell the name both 'Pott' and 'Potts' for the same man, which adds to the confusion.
Where is John Pott buried?
He was first interred in 1827 in the Centre Street burying ground he had himself donated when he laid out the town — a plot cleared in 1895, when about 500 remains were reinterred, most in the Presbyterian Cemetery. A shared John-and-Maria Pott stone is recorded at Charles Baber Cemetery, near his son Benjamin; the exact path his remains took in the 1895 clearance is not fully documented.