Article: It was five or six...

It was five or six years ago, when my husband and I were driving home from a Friends of the Library dinner over in the Charlotte area. By interstate highways, Charlotte is about four hours west-southwest of us and that's the route we'd taken the afternoon before. But now it was a beautiful sunlit morning and instead of fighting the eighteen-wheelers that clog the lanes between Greensboro and Raleigh, we decided to amble home on backroads: NC 49 to Asheboro, then 64 to the edge of Raleigh.

As we neared Asheboro, we started seeing road signs for Seagrove. "Visit the Pottery Center," said one. Others pointed us toward individual potteries. Impulsively, we turned off the main road and detoured into the heart of downtown Seagrove, which still isn't much more than a crossroads collection of retail pottery shops and a few scattered commercial buildings. There wasn't even a stoplight.

We pulled in at the little pottery center to see what it was and I discovered a whole world, whose existence till then I was barely aware of. The tiny two-room structure was lined with shelves of pottery, each distinctively glazed, each bearing the mark of a different potter. To my disappointment, none of it was for sale though. Instead, each piece was numbered and the volunteer behind the counter handed me a sketchy map of the area, a map dotted with numbers. "What you want to do is match the number on the pot you like to the number on the map and then go out to the pottery," she said. "They'll sell you as much as you want."

We found three pieces that we particularly liked, oriented ourselves on the map, and spent the next few hours happily exploring the area. I found that potters are usually gregarious loners - men and women who work in one- or two-person shops, who take pride in a craft well-done, and who are willing to answer the dumbest questions even though they've probably heard them all a thousand times. I also noticed that many of the potteries were tucked back in the woods, up winding lanes no wider than a cowpath.

"Wouldn't this make a great setting for a murder mystery?" I asked my husband.

The idea wouldn't go away. I began to read up on the subject* and made several trips over to see what I was reading made real. I talked to sixth- and seventh-generation potters who knew how to turn a kickwheel before they started to first grade and to newcomers who'd learned their skills at the local community college. I met potters who have done exchange programs at ceramics centers in Europe and Asia and others who've never been out of the state. And I've seen grace of form and color in everything from a humble flowerpot to museum quality vases and urns.

Although all the potters I talked to were helpful and informative, Boyd Owens was so generous with his time and information that it was to him I turned when Warner asked me to have some coasters made up for my new book. Boyd's roots go deep into the red clay earth of the region and he can trace his potting heritage back six generations. He made several sample coasters and this is the one we liked best. It's a burned clay with a gray-white glaze in the center. If you have a taste for the macabre, it might also amuse you to know that they were burned in the same "car kiln" as one of the victims in Uncommon Clay!

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* Two of the best books on North Carolina's potteries are Raised in Clay: The Southern Pottery Tradition by Nancy Sweezy, The University of North Carolina Press, + 1984 Smithsonian Institution; and Turners and Burners: the Folk Potters of North Carolina, by Charles G. Zug III, The University of North Carolina Press, + 1986.

© by Maragret Maron