EAST LIVERPOOL – On Feb. 17, 1901, a special train carried 350 passengers from East Liverpool to Sebring, Ohio, to witness the lavish wedding of Homer J. Taylor, 24, and Pearl Sebring, 20. President McKinley, a close personal friend of the family, sent a set of silver knives and forks, inlaid with gold and with pearl handles.

With the wealth generated by the giant Knowles, Taylor & Knowles pottery, members of the Homer J. and Pearl Sebring Taylor family lived in mansions with servants and vacationed at Atlantic City.

Three decades later the Taylor family’s fortunes and the comfortable life they had known were swept away by The Great Depression. The sprawling K.T.&K. works and the four Sebring potteries were bankrupt and shuttered, their kilns cold and hundreds of pottery workers turned out.

The Taylors’ $400,000 mansion on Park Boulevard was taken by the bank on a $15,000 mortgage default. Butlers, maids and gardeners were discharged. Furnishings and prized possessions were sold to raise cash. A Taylor daughter, Bonnie, was awakened one morning by two women lifting up the mattress of her bed to see if they wanted to buy it. “Go away you, you people!” she yelled.

The richly detailed and highly personal saga of a family’s rise, fall and survival is told in a newly published book, “From East Liverpool to California: The Riches to Rags Story of the Taylor Family,” by Chris Crain of China Hills, Calif., a great-grandson of Homer J. and Pearl Taylor. (Dorrance Publishing Co., Pittsburgh, $106.00. Discounted copies at the East Liverpool Museum of Ceramics.)

A book for pottery collectors as well as a family memoir and local pottery history, the 300-page hardback is printed in full color with more than 200 photographs of the family and of Crain’s extensive personal collection of pottery items, from K.T.&K. Lotus Ware to the “Hand-made KTK Calif” decorative ware created when the Taylors rented an old chicken coop in Burbank for their last-ditch try at making pottery.