Southern Stoneware Museum Iniside International Marketplace Antiques Columbus, Ga.

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-Article By: Lee Reker, Director of Collections - The Columbus Museum (2001)

Allen Woodall, Jr. has been a collector his entire life. While enjoying a long and successful career in broadcasting, his real passion has been collecting objects of cultural patrimony, beginning stamps, coins, old documents, and civil war memorabilia. He inherited his love of history and historical objects from his grandfather, Columbus Historian W.C. Woodall.

He has assembled collections of shaving mugs, beer steins, guns, and even lunchboxes, and authored the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Metal Lunchboxes (Shiffer Publishing, 1992.) Woodall has traveled throughout the southeast for many yes collecting stoneware and folk pottery. His second book, is a two-volume identification and price guide for Southern Stoneware.

To have been a potter in the rural south of the United States' pre-industrial era meant being an essential component of a society that was totally dependant on traditional hand skills for survival. While many of the more difficult tasks, such as house-building, barn-raising, and harvesting were performed by neighbors who worked together on communal tasks, all the of the ingredients necessary for everyday existence were home-made. Rural southerners passed down generation to generation the skills and craftsmanship necessary to make the things that were essential to live. There were two kinds of rural craftsmen: the complete do-it-yourselfer, who created everything needed to provide for a household; and the professional specialist, who made things to sell. Craftsmen who sold their wares had diverse skills. They were blacksmiths, carpenters, tanners, coopers, cobblers, butchers, dressmakers, locksmiths, milliners, weavers, masons and potters. But potters were rare in the early days. Pottery was sufficiently complex that households could rarely set up a shop and a kiln for strictly household use. Also do-it-yourselfers simply could not match the verity wand quality of a skilled potter's work.

Most folk potters owned their on shops and passed down their skills to their children. In times of high demand, these family businesses would hire itinerate potters from out of the region. This would result in vocational cross-influences, even from state to state. The pottery shops often became social centers in the area, especially in winter, when the hot, fired kilns and stacked rows of warm pots provided a cozy atmosphere for story telling, music, and dancing.

The differences between folk art pottery and other kinds of ceramic production are lie in the fact that the basic forms, formulas and techniques were past along from generation to generation without significant change. There was no emphasis placed on creative individualism. Rather, families and regions shared a continuity of refined replication, making it possible to pinpoint the regional origin (sometimes even the family origin) of a piece of pottery over many decades.

More than 200 years ago along the Savannah River of western South Carolina, the district of Edgefield emerged as the wellspring from which nearly all southern folk pottery flowed. The cultural traditions, the climate, and the types of clay that were indigenous to the piedmont region gave rise to a pottery tradition that later spread across to the South of Texas. The potters of this area drew upon traditions, technologies, and ideas taken from parts of the world: from Europe to Africa to Asia, and formed them into a distinctive, alkaline-glazed, stoneware industry. By 1840 there were nearly two dozen potters in the area - a remarkably high number for any region during that time - though there are evidence of Native American pottery production in the area as early as 1800 B.C. Edgefield pottery was utilitarian and came with few decorations, but it more than satisfied the demands of the fast-growing market of pioneer settlers who needed jugs, pitchers, crocks, jars, and churns to help them as they migrated westward to settle the frontier borders of the U.S.

As early as 1816, Edgefield had attracted many itinerant potters, who after becoming immersed in the Edgefield traditions, spread their influence far and wide. These potters began moving west to find new opportunities to set up their own shops in North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and even as far away as Texas. The origin of folk potter can often be distinguished from one region to another by the object's overall appearance, especially by the glazes that were used. The glaze is the glossy coating that is kiln-baked on the pot to seal it from moisture absorbion and from leaking. Salt glaze is found on northern stoneware as well as those pots made in the deep south, but southern pottery tended to exhibit a broader range of collectors. Salt-glazed pots were generally decorated with a cobalt-oxide blue in northern states.

A glaze confined to distinctly southern regions of the U.S. (though also found in some parts of China for thousands of years) employed an alkaline substance made from wood ashes or lime, melted with a silica-bearing material and clay, to produce semi-transparent greens and browns. These glazes often melted into a drip-like pattern on the surface. Other glazes found on southern stoneware were imported when trade resumes with the North after the Civil War. An alluvial clay found near Albany, New York, created a glassy glaze. When fired, this Albany slip produced a smooth brown color. A Michigan slip was also used, as was a Leon Slip imported from Texas. Bristol glazes are found on southern stoneware as well. This opaque white or light grey finish was imported from England and adopted in parts of western Alabama ad Tennessee.

Many potters combined several glazes to produce a variety of surface effects, such as the green / tan frog skin effect, achieved by salt glazing over an Albany slip.

The many shapes and sizes of stoneware pots served a variety of needs in everyday life. Though many universal shapes were derived from seventeenth and eighteenth century England, Scotland, and Wales, some of the shaped found in the South were strictly regional adaptations. One such regional was in the syrup jug. Containing three to five gallons, these jugs show the importance of molasses in the southern diet. However the shape of the pot can be traced to a different use in England - fermenting wine.

-Lee Reker,

-Article By: Lee Reker, Director of Collections - The Columbus Museum (2001) s