Old Edgefield Pottery: Legacy and tradition borne from the soil

Local clay mixed with Southern history create earthen treasures at this storied pottery.

Slabs of freshly mixed pewter-toned wet clay wait patiently inside Old Edgefield Pottery to achieve their calling atop Justin Guy’s well-worked wheel. Guy, Master Potter in residence and Edgefield native son, is proud to carry on with a tradition of pottery-making in this region that extends back more than 200 years, nearly to the founding of Edgefield County, South Carolina, in 1785.

“I grew up playing in the pottery-shard piles on what used to be the plantation where Dave (legendary enslaved potter Dave Drake) spent his last few years,” said Guy. “They didn’t have waste management back in the day, so whenever a pot lost a handle, or had a crack, or was substandard for selling, they just threw it out the back door. Pottery was something I grew up with.”

Guy doesn’t need much encouragement to share lessons learned over a lifetime mastering his craft. His scholarly research and approachable style earned him an adjunct faculty role at the nearby University of South Carolina, Aiken campus.

He explains pottery in the region began during America’s infancy. Early colonists in this rural corner of South Carolina found abundant high-quality, mineral-rich clay deposits in addition to the agriculturally fertile soil surrounded their farms. The clay, when mixed, shaped, glazed and subsequently fired, yields almost porcelain-like stoneware.

The newly formed union eschewed British manufactured goods when President Thomas Jefferson’s taxation on these goods made tableware, storage vessels and the like inaccessible. Local artisans seized on the opportunity to make their own.

“During Jefferson’s administration, a lot of these cottage industries spark up, and pottery was this area’s production,”Guy said. “It was strictly utilitarian, basically food- and liquid-preservation. There were two basic storage vessels. Meat and vegetables were stored in jars, sealed off with cheesecloth and paraffin. And whiskey, honey and mead were stored in jugs. Eventually, they branch out into pitchers and butter churns. Decorative pieces and face jugs developed later as potteries become more expansive. At one point, they have five or six potteries in our region.”

Edgefield’s most renowned potter, Dave Drake, aka Dave the Potter, or more commonly just Dave, began his pottery journey shortly after the turn of the 19th century. “Dave was born about 1801,” Guy said. “He would have learned about the age of 10, and we know he continued into his 70s.” Over the course of his lifetime, Dave created, by some estimates, more than 50,000 pieces of pottery. Most well-known are his enormous jars and jugs, some well over two feet tall and, during an early and prolific period, many were inscribed with poetic verse.

Despite being born into enslavement, Dave learned to read and write. Though history is unclear as to his teachers, some speculate it was one of Dave’s owners, Abner Landrum, publisher of the weekly Edgefield Hive, that taught Dave by allowing him to work as a typesetter at the paper.

According to noted Dave scholar and researcher Leonard Todd, Dave’s work has a special magnetism. “There is something about Dave’s work that draws people to it,” Todd said. “There is an attraction that goes beyond its obvious technical expertise. We see in it his longing to communicate. He’s talking to us today, and we can reach out and touch his words almost two centuries later.”

Todd is the author of Carolina Clay: The Life and Legend of the Slave Potter Dave. The 2008 book explores the compelling narrative of this legendary Edgefield potter. Todd’s book shares many of Dave’s pottery poems including his first known poem, written on a jar dated July 12, 1834:

put every bit all between

surely this Jar will hold 14

Dave’s pieces are regarded for their elemental beauty, glorious green, gray and brown glazes, signature bulbous shaping, tight handles and a slight drunken tilt. His work is found in museums throughout the U.S., including at the Smithsonian, Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art, Boston Museum of Fine Art, the McKissick Museum in Columbia, South Carolina., and others. At auction, Dave’s pots command attention where one reported sale brought $180,000 for a single jug.

“Though they were always utilitarian in nature and made as part of his work as a slave, he often imbued them with a grace that transformed them into works of art,” Todd said of Dave’s pots. “Dave found a way to leave a kind of journal on his jars. In the damp clay that he understood so well, he wrote about the elements of his daily life—the people he loved, the biblical teachings he believed in, his moments of recreation, and, most often, the qualities of the very jars he was writing on.”

When asked why Dave the Potter holds such a fascination with so many today, Guy was reflective.

“We love hero stories,” he said. “Dave is the perfect hero. He was [enslaved]. But he had the liberty and the freedom to create things, and to write some of his thoughts and stories onto. Everybody who’s in this business can at least quote one Dave verse,”

Cows, sheep, and hogs,

all our mules are in the bogs

*A similar version of this article previously appeared at the Old 96 District South Carolina website.

Michael J. Solender is a Charlotte, N.C.-based journalist. His work has been featured at The New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, Metropolis Magazine, Salvation South, Southern Living, Charlotte magazine, NASCAR Illustrated, American City Business Journals, Business North Carolina, The Jewish Daily Forward, and others. Read more from him at https://michaeljwrites.com/.

This story was originally published October 6, 2022 at 9:00 AM with the headline "Old Edgefield Pottery: Legacy and tradition borne from the soil."