Bartley Crucible & Refractories, Inc. manufactured graphite crucibles in a plant at 67 Oxford Street in Trenton, New Jersey, a major center for the pottery industry. The company was originally named the Jonathan Bartley Crucible Company and was incorporated on February 24, 1908. This collection consists of the business records of the firm throughout its various name changes and the personal papers of two owners: Lewis H. Lawton (1876-1953), a former master bricklayer, and Walter L. Shearer (1900-1984), a ceramic engineer who had been a consultant to Bartley since 1930. None of the records are complete. The business records and the Shearer papers and ephemera represent selections of much larger bodies of material, while the Lawton papers are an accidentally preserved sample from the plant. Substantive correspondence has been sifted from a large mass of orders, bills, and receipts. A sample of more routine correspondence has been saved to give an accurate picture of each firm's trading relationships. The Shearer materials have been sampled to present a picture of his education, personality, and social life.