Shopping: Pottery : Wheels of Fortune : Working with the earth’s red clay, Seagrove artists explore a tradition older than America

Deep in the rolling green hills of North Carolina’s Piedmont region, the plateau between the coastal plain and the Appalachian Mountains, the earth is rich and red. Drive down country roads and the dirt rises in billowing ocher clouds. Along paved byways, eroding ditches run like unraveled ribbons of orange. In a soaking rain, it mires shoes and tires and it clouds rivers, creeks and ponds. The red clay is everywhere, as are the potters of Seagrove.

For generations, the Coles, Owens and Teagues, the old families who live along North Carolina 705 and its snaking secondary roads, have worked the clay found on the surface and in low-lying creek beds and river bottoms, continuing a tradition that has stretched unbroken back to the 1750s. Holding on through the 20th Century, when inexpensive manufactured goods displaced local potters elsewhere in the country, they have survived to experience a renaissance fueled by a renewed interest in things handmade.

Now a recognized pottery center drawing artisans and tourists from all over the world, the number of potteries within a 20-mile radius of the tiny town of Seagrove (population 357) has swelled to 60, from the five that were there in the 1960s, forming the largest community of potters in the country.

I grew up with Seagrove pottery. Raised in Asheboro, the nearest “big” town (pop. 15,000), the artistry surrounded me. My mother’s brown fluted pie dish, the one she used for company baking, was from Seagrove. And so were the turquoise pedestal cake plate that displayed her special chocolate pound cake at family reunions and the planter holding a climbing philodendron that graced the archway between our dining room and parlor. Although I admired the jeweled or earthen tones of these pieces, I knew nothing of their part in a craft tradition extending hundreds of years into the past of Randolph and Moore counties, the region my family has called home for just as long. I knew them instead by the names of their makers: the Cole dish, the Jugtown cake plate, the families whose hands they came from.

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Located about 60 miles west of the high-tech boom and bustle of the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Research Triangle, where many travelers to North Carolina come on business or to visit the state’s top universities, Seagrove retains the character of a quieter, smaller North Carolina, when the family farm was the basic economic unit. This is still farm country. Barbed-wire fences and pine woods thick with undergrowth separate pasture and field. And here, tucked away in unassuming log cabins and out buildings denoted by hand-painted signs, are some of the country’s finest craftspeople, carrying on a tradition older than America itself.

The history of wheel-turned pottery in North Carolina began in the 1750s, when German and Scotch Irish settlers traveled down the Shenandoah Valley from the Northeast into the Piedmont region of both Carolinas. The first significant group of potters were the Protestant Moravians, who settled around what is now Winston-Salem. Working in a system much like that of European medieval guilds, they produced highly decorative ware. English potters migrated to the area around Seagrove, in the south-central part of present-day North Carolina. Cut off from the coastal plain and its cash-based economy by poor roads, they became self-sufficient farmers who made functional pots.

The 20th Century brought mass-produced glass jars, as well as a decline in small, independent farms. With the exception of whiskey jugs, the demand for utilitarian pottery plummeted. At the turn of the century, wealthy visitors to Pinehurst, a nearby mineral spa and resort, wandered into these Moore and Randolph county potteries with requests for decorative objects they could display in their homes.

Nell Cole Graves, now 86, continues to turn pots at J.B. Cole’s Pottery and visitors continue to travel down the dirt road to the dim showroom to admire the clean lines of Cole dishware. (Place settings are $31.50; Rebecca pitchers, Nell’s specialty, are $10 and $20.) Graves remembers how the tourists drew her family into exploring new shapes and glazes. “These customers would want a fancy pie plate, maybe fluted on the edge or a fancy vase. They would draw for us what they wanted. We would change the shape a little, make it more ours. It wasn’t but just a short while and the neighbors bought it just like the tourists.”

Their survival was also attributable in large part to the efforts of Jacques and Juliana Busbee, who discovered the Seagrove potteries in 1917. The Busbees persuaded local potters to let them sell their wares at Julian’s tea shop in New York’s Greenwich Village. Hoping to produce and preserve the traditional salt-glazed stoneware and dirt dishes, as well as explore stoneware forms inspired by Chinese and Korean pots, they opened Seagrove’s Jugtown Pottery in 1923. The established potters refused to work with them.

It was Ben Owen and Charlie Teague, young men from old pottery families, who were willing to learn to make the small dishware the Busbees wanted. In an inspired move, the Busbees took Owen to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to show him exactly what they had in mind. They introduced him to ceramics of other eras, specifically Chinese pottery of the Han and Sung dynasties. Owen became skilled at interpreting these elegant shapes using local materials and traditional turning and firing techniques. His influence--his embrace of Asian style, for example--can still be seen today, woven into the local idiom.

Jugtown has since become synonymous with Seagrove pottery.

The totem of a broken pot marks the chimney of the wood-burning kiln; a flagstone path leads to the hand-built log building that houses the shop where visitors pull a string latch to enter. A wide array of utilitarian and decorative pottery ($6-$10 for a cup to $125 for a wood-fired vase) is displayed on tables and on the windowsills of curtainless windows--teapots, mugs, sugar-creamer sets, casseroles, candlesticks and serving bowls and platters in various sizes. Five-piece place settings run from $45 to $60, depending on whether they are production pieces or gas or wood-fired.

Jugtown owner Vernon Owens, whose family runs M. L. Owens Pottery and who first came to Jugtown in 1960 when the business was sold after Jacques Busbee’s death, witnessed the Seagrove pottery revival that began in the 1970s, fueled by a new market for handcrafted items.

“You can’t collect what you don’t know about,” said Charles G. Zug III, director of the folklore curriculum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, about the 50-year period in which the pottery was not particularly popular, “and Southern pottery was not only produced in isolated pockets but largely undecorated, which meant it was overshadowed by the decorated pottery of other regions. In the early ‘70s, all things Southern began to appeal. The Bicentennial renewed interest in Americana; there was the emergence of Outsider Art, largely a Southern phenomenon, and suddenly, Seagrove pottery caught on.”

While Owens admires the variety such exposure nurtures, he prefers traditional salt-glazed pieces with their texture similar to that of orange peels. At work in a small low-ceiling log building with an earthen floor, he compares the flare opening of the tall jar on his wheel to the dozen others lined up nearby. “The decoration on pottery has sort of overruled the pottery itself. It’s art now. I still like to make a plain old pot, let the shape show and enjoy the form.” Salt-glazed churns are priced at $75 to $100; pitchers are $25 to $50.

In a log building adjoining the shop is a small museum where glass cases display examples of forms made and glazes used during Jugtown’s history. Most important are the large pots made by the late Ben Owen.

A nationally renowned master by 1959, Owen opened his own shop where he honed his skill with Chinese pots and an exotic Chinese blue glaze, a rich turquoise mottled with oxblood that he first developed at Jugtown. Today the family tradition continues in the work of his grandson, Ben Owen III. Owen studied world pottery as an art major at East Carolina University, coming home weekends to turn pots in the family tradition.

Along the display shelves and tables inside the hand-built log building of Ben Owen Pottery, visitors see the continuation of the legacy that Ben Owen Sr. and the Busbees improvised at Jugtown. Like his grandfather, Owen has also developed dramatically rich glazes not found elsewhere--deep purple, bright blue-red, white and mirror black. Owen’s functional pieces, mugs and serving bowls are priced from $10 to $20. More elaborate carved pieces run from $50 to $150, while large one-of-a-kind pieces are $450 to $1,500.

While Owen represents the newest generation of old-line potters, Mary and Dave Farrell of nearby Westmoore Pottery are among the oldest of the new arrivals drawn by Seagrove’s pottery tradition. The couple met while working as apprentices at Jugtown, and in 1977 they opened Westmoore Pottery, with its focus on plain and highly decorated red ware produced by North Carolina potters until around 1850.

Colorful raised clay geometric and floral designs referred to as “slip-trailing,” in vibrant green, stark white and warm terra-cotta, decorate gently sloped red clay plates, bowls and platters, which are then covered with a clear glaze. While the couple produced regional salt-glazed stoneware ($96 for churns, $36 for gallon jugs) in the light gray and brown variations of Colonial America, their plates decorated with Moravian-style flowers, priced at $45, remain their best sellers. Place settings of red ware with simple slip trailing run around $45.

“We focus on Piedmont, N.C.,” said Mary Farrell, “including the Quaker settlements and the Moravians around Winston-Salem, but we do anything made or used in Colonial America.” Speaking for the many potters who have been drawn to Seagrove, Farrell calls the community “the next best thing to being adopted. There’s just a nice feeling to think you’re living in an area where people have made a living making pots for a long time and to have working potters around . . . to know there is a background, especially for those who didn’t grow up in it and wish they had.”

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GUIDEBOOK

The Seagrove Scene

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Finding pottery: Seagrove is 40 miles south of Greensboro and 11 miles south of Asheboro, at the intersection of U.S. 220 and North Carolina 705. The majority of potteries are located along route 705 and various secondary roads. Large hand-painted signs direct visitors. Call for hours.

The following are personal favorites:

Ben Owen Pottery, on 705 next to Westmoore School; (910) 464-2261.

J. B. Cole’s Pottery, Cagle Road, off old 220; (910) 873-7171.

Jugtown Pottery, 330 Jugtown Road; (910) 464-3266.

M. L. Owens Pottery, 3728 Busbee Road; (910) 464-3553.

Westmoore Pottery, 4622 Busbee Road; a small brochure offering items through mail order is available upon request; (910) 464-3700.

For more information: A free map is available from the Museum of North Carolina Traditional Pottery, P.O. Box 500, Seagrove, N.C. 27341; (910) 873-7887.