Editor's note: As the nation celebrates its birth, the staff of the Home & Garden section wanted to celebrate some enigmatic pieces of Sacramento history.

Touching the uneven surfaces on a Panama Pottery antique is almost like touching the fingers that shaped clay on a potter's wheel nearly 100 years ago.

Looking at brightly colored vases, you can see how wet glazes dripped as they were applied long ago.

In the first few decades of the last century, Sacramento's Panama Pottery created art pottery that may appear roughly thrown or hastily colored.

Today, those same characteristics are hallmarks of what is increasingly collectible work.

Panama Pottery operates today on the original site – 24th Street between the railroad tracks and Hollywood Park – on which it opened.

Though operation has been nearly continuous, there hasn't been the same continuity with respect to the original artistic styles.

Aside from the site, much of the company's origins are mysterious. Even the year Panama opened is uncertain. The modern business says 1913, but the place first shows up in the Sacramento City Directory in 1914.

That makes sense because 1914 was also the year the Panama Canal opened, though there is some evidence the pottery opened earlier and only got its name in 1914.

"That's why he called it Panama Pottery," said Mike Allgood, a collector and dealer who co-owns Mike & Greg's Fine Antiques in east Sacramento.

The "he" to whom Allgood refers was Swedish immigrant Victor Axelson, the first listed manager of Panama Pottery.

Panama was far from the only pottery in the area.

"You could throw a rock and hit a pottery in California," Allgood said.

"There were hundreds of potteries," said Terry Maurer, a Washington state dealer and writer on pottery antiques.

Many of the potteries produced utilitarian goods – crocks, churns, tiles or sewer pipe like that still produced by Gladding, McBean in Lincoln.

A smaller number were responding to a demand for beautiful objects – a demand later reduced by the Depression and cheaper products from abroad.

Panama made Arts and Crafts-style vases, nesting bowls, cups and urnlike jars that Allgood thinks may have been inspired by funerary objects found in King Tut's tomb when it was discovered in 1922.

The goods were sold in stores like Sacramento's Weinstock-Lubin, and in the 1920s, The Bee reported that Panama Pottery's goods were shipped throughout "Superior California," to Hawaii and to the Far East.

With the Depression and an influx of imported pottery, Panama focused more on utilitarian goods, although it continued to make decorative pottery for decades.

Panama still makes flowerpots, using age-old equipment that manager Carol Honda aptly describes as machinery out of "The Flintstones."

The antique Panama Pottery art ware, meanwhile, has become an interesting branch of the pottery collecting tree.

For one thing, collectors may not even know they're collecting it.

Panama Pottery marked few pieces because of the cost of doing so.

"Putting the pottery name on the ware was a mark of pride for most companies, but it did require an extra effort," said Jack Chipman, an expert on California pottery who answered a question by e-mail.

"Time is money, so some opted to not do it."

As a consequence, Panama's most avid fans believe that some collectors hold pieces, hoping they are unusual examples of Bauer pottery or Merced Pottery, or even something out of Ohio.

"A lot of people started collecting Panama thinking it was something else," said Sacramento collector June Sakata. "They're hoping it was Bauer."

Bauer made colorful pottery in Kentucky and Los Angeles from the 1880s into the 1960s. For most collectors, its vintage pieces are better known and more sought-after than Panama.

Merced lawyer Richard Neil Morse wrote a small book on Merced Pottery that includes a small section on Panama Pottery.

Some evidence, however, suggests that Morse's Merced Pottery is actually Panama Pottery that was sold in Merced.

Call The Bee's Carlos Alcalá, (916) 321-1987.