Alexander “Ellick” (or Elix) Brown is known primarily through oral histories of the Hunt family, who owned and operated a pottery Rusk County, Texas, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Descendants of John Fleming Hunt name Ellick Brown, formerly enslaved at the Taylor Brown pottery, as the artisan who taught their ancestor to make stoneware around the 1880s.

Pottery fragments inscribed with a distinctive “EB” configuration have been found at the Hunt site,

and this pitcher is a rare example of the finely shaped and evenly glazed wares that bear this mark.