Saturday Evening Girls

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The Saturday Evening Girls was an ofshoot of the Paul Revere Pottery in Boston, Massachusetts. Mrs. James J. Storrow, a founding member of the North Bennet Industrial School in Boston’s North End (A center now with name of the North Bennet Street School that continues to teach handcraftsmanship), became interested in providing high school age women with free lectures on Saturday evening at the North end branch of the Boston Public Library.

This initiative was intended to benefit poor immigrant children of the North end. Dues for membership were paid by service of one hour per week from each member. The Saturday Evening Girls efforts focused on decorating earthenware made under the name of the Paul Revere Pottery (1906-1942). The librarian at the North End Branch of the Boston Public Library, Edith Guerrier, was supervisor of the S.E.G. Club. With her friend, Edith Brown, a designer and illustrator, they established the SEG pottery initiative in 1907.

In 1912, Mrs. Storrow purchased a house at 18 Hull Street, Boston, where SEG wares were sold from what was called The Bowl Shop of the Paul Revere Pottery. Within three years these quarters were abandoned and replaced with a pottery on Nottingham Road in Brighton. It was designed by Edith Brown and the pottery was staffed with a potter, designer, kilnman and an assistant to provide support for the Saturday Evening Girls who came to number 200 working at the pottery part –time.

At any one time, not more that fifteen or twenty members of SEG were present working in the pottery. Works decorated by women of the SEG club usually bore the SEG mark and initialed by the individual who decorated Paul Revere pottery, much of which was marketed in a sales room on Boylston Street, Boston. The Saturday Evening Girls pottery was sadly not a financial success. Mrs. Storrow subsidized it until 1942 at which time the antique pottery closed.