Crawdad Slip Transcript
- They're like people. A piece of pottery is like a person. In that it's a unique individual. The first folks that I'm aware of coming to this part of North Carolina to make pottery were the Coles and the Craven family. The Coles moved here from Staffordshire, England in the 1750s and started making pots. They were cousins of mine. My family married into them. In fact that's probably how they got into pottery. And pottery has been made continuously. It's an unbroken cycle since the time they got here. So that amounts to nearly 250 years.
Of course in those days, they were the community potters that provided the stuff to eat off of and store the food in, and utilitarian, useful vessels. All the old potters that I'm aware of-- even up into my younger days--were farmers first. They had to farm and make something to eat. And then they did pottery. It's a cottage industry. I like to carry on the old tradition of making the old functional shapes, and you can still use them or you can decorate with them. This is quite a functional piece, just a plain old coffee mug. You could put anything in it, even drink beer out of it if you want to. To do this, you have to like it, and I started when I was about 10 years old. My dad decided it was time for me to learn something to keep me out of trouble. So he built that wheel that's right behind you there in about 1956 and put it in the basement, because that's the only place we had electricity. My grandpa's old shop had no electricity. And then we decided to move it up to the Coles, or he did. And we moved it up there for several years, and I turned, and he would turn at J.B. Cole's. My brother never really cared that much about it seems like, he turned some but not much.
It's a one gallon whiskey jug. It's glazed inside and out. One of the major products of the potters around here during the years right after the civil war-- from say the 1870s through the early 1900s-- were whiskey jugs for transporting whiskey. A lot of the stills were set up after the civil war to turn the corn-- because there were a lot of livestock that had been killed, and they had good corn crop-- they turned the corn into whiskey and sent it west for the final settlement of the West, where there was a big market for it. But then along comes like Mason jars, the glass industry, and started replacing that in the early part of the 20th century. And that was their way of making a living, and it was hard to lose that. They had really nothing else. And again that was sort of the really beginning of the decline, of a really major decline, and the need for, for handmade pottery. And the reason it almost died out in this area. By the 1950s and '60s, there were only two or three operating potteries in this area. It was actually the beginning, the early part of this century and particularly I guess the '20s and '30s and really by the '40s and '50s, industry had moved into Ohio.
The pottery industry mechanized industry, and they had begun to make lots of the vessels they needed in large quantities by machinery. And that helped us kind of start the, the decline of pottery, the need for the community potter. Especially, well I know it did around here in the Seagrove area. Instead of doing 10,000 pieces a year, they did 10,000 pieces a day. And so they sort of about put the old potters, the old community potters like my family had been since the 1860s in this area, about put them out of business. Sometime in the 1920s, I believe it was, Jacques Busbee and his wife came into this area, and they had a keen interest in pottery. They'd traveled all over the world, and they were especially interested in oriental pottery. They had collected a lot of that. But they saw the potters in this area, and saw that there was no market for it. And it appeared that it was gonna die out-- starting to die out then. So they set up a place, they called Jugtown. A center, I guess you'd call it, to preserve pottery in this area. They hired some local potters to work for them. And one of them was Ben Owen, the Master Potter. That's Ben III who now has a shop here-- his grandfather.
Another one was Vernon Owens who currently owns the shop. And some of the Cravens. That was really, I guess, the first effort to save the pottery or to keep it going continuously like it has done. The only pottery that survived through the depression years in this area and worked continuously was J.B. Cole's. They were--I guess you would say-- had a business mind about them. They actually went up into New York and Chicago in the '20s and '30s and, and got contracts to make lamp bases for people. And then Pinehurst began to develop down here, I don't know if you're familiar with Pinehurst, it's sort of a resort just south of here. A resort for what some people now call or have called "Snowbirds." They were wealthy Northeastern people who wanted to come south for the winter so they didn't have to endure so much cold and snow and stuff. And they too were looking for some more decorative stuff to put in their homes. And so the Coles began to adapt to that. They--J.B. Cole's--did. They began to make pieces that were more decorative and less functional for them. My family, my dad, just sort of refused to change over. And my grandfather never really changed over, maybe a little bit, but not much. These little critters are called cones, and they're straight when we put them in there, and when they get hot enough, they start melting, start bending. This one bends at about 1800, which is the temperature of-- that we like to fire our bisque to. And it tells me it's time to turn the kiln off, because these are manually operated kilns, so I go back and turn the gas off to the kiln, and let it cool down. It has to cool about, for at least eight hours, usually 12 won't hurt, after and before you open it up, so you don't break the pieces from thermal shock. I did not go into it full time. I always wanted to 'til about nine years ago. And the reason was, there was just no market for it. I went straight into the military. Right into the Marine Corps, right out of high school. And I spent four years in there. And after I got out of that, I went straight into college, and did four, actually three and a half years. I got a bachelor's degree in chemistry. And I taught chemistry in high schools for about 18 years.
Now I need to blow off some of these things. All this time I was a potter, and did part-time pottery, either worked at J.B. Cole's, worked some with, on my own or both. We're gonna wax up. This is a bisque ware that we just got out of the kiln, and then dip it like we did yesterday, and load what we can in the big one out back, and fire it up. I have not spent my whole life dedicated entirely to pottery, because I just couldn't make a living at it. And only not until really the late '80s did I realize that there was enough tourism in this area and interest in it that I thought I could really make a living at it, and I gave it a shot. I'm real happy I did. This thing's moving to the left, because I got to put a cone on it.
- Okay right.
- Right where it's at. Steve, while you're up, can I get you to help me put this in there? We did it. This is the, well the other stuff so we're gonna put this, oops, with the rest of the stuff. We got a bolt tucked here that we can bolt this thing shut to keep the pressure inside this as it gets hot is something to behold. It'll push the whole thing out if it's not fastened securely. I can't imagine anybody even today going right into pottery as a young person without some financial backing, because it takes a while to build up a following. And even with the tourism we have, you need like regular customers or customers that admire your work and constantly want to keep updated in what you're doing. The big drawback to pottery in terms of getting rich is your production. You just can't produce enough pieces because they're hand turned. They take time. And so instead of, you know, a good commercial pottery probably produces 10,000 pieces an hour, and even a highly fairly productive potter here probably wouldn't produce 15,000 pieces in a whole year.
- [Steve] Well the hardest part to making pottery is the centering.
- [Sid] Over the several people have come through and worked with me, and right now I have Steve Morgan up the road. He's worked with me probably five or six years. And he's actually a, an X-Ray technologist at Moore Regional hospital. But he works second shift, so he'll come down and spend two or three hours, whatever mornings during the week he wants to come. And he actually does production and he's getting to be a very good potter.
- I was thinking about going to school for it, and I met Sid through a friend. And he said not to do that just to come here and he'd teach me, which he did. And he's taught me everything I know.
- Can I use some of that? This one here too could use-
- [Sid] Shirley came in after I opened up on my own, probably about 1990. And she had been an electrician's helper with her husband. They were out of work and she just wanted to hang around and help me, and if she could. She didn't want any money, she said. I said, I encouraged her to get on the wheel. And she took to it like a duck to water. I mean she learned within, really within a year she had small pieces that were sellable. After she got to turning stuff, I hired her on within, I asked her if she would just work for money. Without her, I would do a whole lot less production, because she has such a good sense of form and she's really the ideal person that anybody would want to work with because she's, she is so dedicated to her work.
- I'm getting that thing and take it back.
- [Sid] That's really part of the process that's very, very enjoyable is meeting all of the different people and talking with them. I know I get it in excess of 10,000 a year. For the most part, I get the more professional type person, a lot of physicians and attorneys and businessmen or business people. They're not just men. In fact most of my customers are women, but they are oftentimes fit in those categories, maybe the spouse of a professional person or they themselves are professional person. Even today, the older people say, "What in the world is all these people doing here? Ain't they got something better to spend their money for?" And they need to know what's so interesting about that. It's just the old pottery.
- [James] You got just a little bit of a wobble in it at the top, see?
- Yeah I was gonna get that out, trust me. Even my daddy is that way.
- It just don't make sense to me.
- [Sid] There's a lot of the local people and even the old local potters who are amazed and astounded and downright just don't understand why anybody has any interest in it. I mean it's just something that used to be, they say.
- My grandfather's work I admired a lot. His churns and jugs. This is about a two gallon jug made by my grandfather, Emerson Bud Luck. It's made out of, it's got a lot of the Mitchfield or Almond clay in it, and it's glazed in salt. It's vapor glazed with salt. And this, these runs down are drips from the arch, which nowadays a salt piece that has a drip on it is much more valuable than one that doesn't have, because modern kilns, they don't use the old handmade brick. What that actually is some mineral that melted out of the brick. It was in the arch and drips down on there. And the old handmade bricks had those extraneous minerals in them. They made these jugs just to store cider and syrup and whiskey and whatnot in, and when they got done with them, a lot of the kids when they were little, just broke them for the heck of it. So there's not a lot of 'em still around I wouldn't think.
Looks like the vines are about taking over. That's my grandfather's shop. Bud Luck's old shop, and it was built with a "barn raising" they called it. The whole community got together and cut the logs, come together one day and erected it. So it was kind of a community project. It's like going into a haunted house, isn't it? Right here is grandpa's old wheel, his old kick wheel, still standing here see. It won't rotate, it's hung up on something. You just stood here and kicked it like this, back and forth, back and forth. Kicked it while you turned. The leg you stand on is the one that bothers you when you're doing this, because it's bearing most of the weight of your body. And so it's the one that gets you. My dad's wheel was sitting over there. Looks like my daddy made that jug. I think my brother may have done this, just to mess. And that's a flower pot sitting right up there. And there's an umbrella stand. I wonder if that thing's been leaked in? I might be able to fire that and save it. This is a deserted place. This apparently is a junk heaping up, but that's the, that's our old kiln and the front is missing off of it. That's the firebox you can look into right there. That's a wood-fired above ground, ground hog, I guess. We put most of it above ground. Some of it's still below the ground. The last time we fired it, I guess was in 1969. I guess we probably fired it eight to 10 times. So it's--it was never used very much. And when I, when I left to go on and go to college, and in the Marines, my dad just didn't do anything with it. He just, he didn't have much interest in it.
- We've done it the hard way, we fired with wood and hot weather. You'd burn yourself up at it. We'd glazed with salt. And we had to heat it to about 2200 degrees. And boy you could just burn yourself up. Pull that sheet iron back off to put a fire on. If you didn't have some brick piled up there, you'd burn your shoes off your feet almost. It was rough work back then.
- [Sid] I think my grandfather made him work as a young man, and it was especially in his 20s and teens, and '20s were like depression years, and '30s even, his early 30s. And there was not much of a market for anything, especially pottery. So he really got turned off. He just regarded it as very hard work for nothing.
- We farmed. Made us something to eat on the farm. I finally got to growing hogs and chickens, and that's the way I made a living. But now this thing, there must be a lot of money to be made at it, the way people, gosh I don't know how many it is now. About back when we was in it, there wasn't but about two or three potters in the whole country around here. And now then it's, I don't know what, Sid how many is it? Is it about seventy some?
- [Sid] 90 some.
- 90 some, golly. .
- Most of the potters in this area now have trained through some formal program. To where a good number of them come through the academic, the college type programs in here in the United States, and most of their work has very much an Oriental flair. And it's what I call pretty much mainstream pottery here in, in the United States. You can find it about anywhere whereas there's a few of us here that we're trained by our families and we, we do maybe more European type forms, functional forms. Right now we're being what I call odd-manned in, with all the folks, the new folks moving in, who all of them have formal training from some university or some art school somewhere. And so the old traditional stuff like I do seems to be, it is indeed for me, in much greater demand, because of all the other folks moving in here. And they bring customers, their customers, and they come out here and visit me too, so I end having another customer as a result of them. There's a great, great demand for our work now. Let's see what it looks like in there. Yes siree. That looks great Shirley. You did a good job. Every time that you open it, it's an exciting time. Yeah some people describe it as Christmas morning. Every time you open the kiln, it's Christmas morning. But especially a large one like that because you run the, you run the chance of messing up so much stuff if the whole thing, you know, if you have some problem and it doesn't work, then you have messed up days and days and days of work. And so I guess that's, that's why it's so exciting. It's so pleasing when it is now, but rarely do you ever get a total failure, or I really have never had a total failure. You can always save some of it. And usually most of it. Oh, there you go. Shirley often makes little cups and puts critters in 'em. I call them. I call them critter cups. She'll put a worm or a frog.
- Oh my goodness.
- [Woman] Oh look at the turtle ones.
- [Sid] And they're often really taken aback by that. And often buy them to play tricks on their friends, because there's a little worm or a little bug or a frog or whatnot sitting down in the bottom of your coffee cup. So you can fill that up with coffee and, and serve it to your friend, and when they get down there and see that, they get bugged eyed. There's a mug, the frog mug, that actually was made in old England. I'm not sure of exactly where, but I'm aware of the fact that it did come here from our English ancestry. Bringing some cereal bowls for one of my friends. And this is made out of this glaze is my, my crawdad slip, and I put it on an extra, extra thick and it still did well. I, it's unbelievable. I've never been able to get that on too thick. It does, it looks like it, it, it didn't need to be that thick, but it's there to stay isn't it? You ought to be able to eat cereal out of those for a hundred thousand years. That's a little half gallon buttermilk pitcher. That one is well turned too, it's nice and thin. Some of the old potters would say that that's not good, because it'd break too easy, but it's a sign of a good potter that can turn one thin. I do a lot of jugs, which judge no longer have a function in our society other than a decorative use, but I, and I often decorate jugs, and put faces on them, which is becoming very, very popular around here in recent years. Face jugs, they're called face jugs, ugly jugs, grotesque jugs, or whatever. They've probably been around since the beginnings of time, but they were brought here to the Southeast. The first recorded ones in the Southeast were found around Edgefield, South Carolina, where there were large potteries that had lots of slave potters. And the slaves apparently made, the African slaves made a, made a lot of them, and it's known for a fact that one illiterate slave named Dave made several face jugs. And those are the earliest ones found here in the Southeast. So it may have come here then from Africa.
- [Steve] Just run the wire at the bottom of the piece and cut it all the way through, and usually try to cut it twice to make sure it's, it turns loose.
- The casserole, well potters have made those for centuries to cook in, and that one's capable of, you can cook in it. But it's, it's difficult for me to make and get the lids to fit right. But this is an old shape, form of one, that my great uncle did at J.B. Cole's in the '30s, '40s, and the early '50s till he died. He made those for them. Called it an Ad Luck casserole. His name was Adelbert Luck. He was my granddaddy's brother. He did casseroles. He did gravy boats. And I still do those and as far as I know, I'm the only one that does the gravy boat. This was the old form of probably back when they had 13 children, this was a simple, I guess, poor man's gravy boat. It's, you'd need one that big if you had 13 children. People use those for serving bowls now. This one is a soup bowl. My son made that one, Jason. With any pottery, you can use it in a microwave oven. With most pottery, in a microwave oven or a regular oven, but you can't set it on a burner. If you set it on a burner, it'll break the bottom out of it about every time. It's an uneven heat, expands the bottom and the sides don't get enough heat to expand at the same rate. So ka-pow, it comes apart. Lead has been used well all the way back to the old Roman empire. It's been known that the lead was used for various purposes. And it was a, it's also been known by most academics that it was harmful.
The general population, nobody ever bothered to tell them until probably about this century, probably. A lot of the old original glazes that were used, especially when they began to transform from the functional ware into the more decorative stuff. They wanted to get some really pretty colors and lead as an ingredient in glazes, for some reason seemed to amplify and magnify wonderful colors like greens and blues, and even reds. You know you could get reds and oranges and yellows, and all nice, nice colors using lead. So early on, particularly from the 1920s up to probably through the '50s, lead was very much an ingredient in all those kind of colorful glazes. And then by the '70s, late '60s and early '70s, there was a lot of attention being paid to environmental and health issues here in the country. And it, it's the E, let's see, who, who is it? 'Cause it's not the EPA, but it's one of those, the Center for Disease Control, or maybe, it's one of those in Atlanta. Anyway they, they began to monitor potters in this area and advise them that they could no longer use lead in their glazes, because you had the possibility of leaching it out with any kind of acid food.
And so that caused a lot of the potters to, the old potters then, they had to switch and formulate new glazes. And it was a real problem for them, because most of them had really no knowledge of what they were doing. How they got the glaze to start with, they just picked it up from somebody. Somebody said, look this will work, and so they had no idea of the composition. I mean they knew what was in the glaze and how to put it in by the formula, but they had no idea how it worked chemically. I won't use it. I don't really wanna work with lead or cadmium or any of the heavy metals. I'm looking for that yellowish grayish clay, my crawdad slip I call it. My favorite glaze is a clay that I found accidentally sometime when my boys were very young, I was down in the creek, they were down in the creek playing, catching crawdads, and I noticed some clay up on the bank, or what looked like clay and so I took, came back up to the shop, it's only like 200 yards from the shop, and got the post hole diggers and dug out some of the clay and took it up, and cleaned the roots, and rocks, and stuff out of it, and turned a few little pieces out of it, and fired 'em. And then I fired them in the bisque, which goes up to about 18--1900 and they did okay. Then I put a glaze on them and put them in the kiln and fired them up to past 2000 degrees, maybe the 2200 range, and they melted. They just squatted down. So I knew it was an earthenware clay, and it had some possibilities for making a slip glaze. If you use a natural clay that you dig over a stoneware piece it's called a slip glaze.
So I had my oldest son Jason to start working. He's doing a science project. So I said, one thing you can do for this science project, to be totally different, original, is to, is to take this clay and mix some different minerals with it and see which one fluxes it the best. Flux is a mineral when you mix it with another mineral or material in terms of ceramic melting, it would cause it to melt at a lower temperature, and maybe run and that kind of thing. So he did. The one that came out the best was limestone, and it gave just sort of like a frog skin look for a glaze. In really all parts of the state, particularly the Piedmont region of North Carolina has good clay deposit, so that extends. And even westward, there's also major deposits, good deposits up in the Catawba Valley region, which is the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. There have been potters up there almost probably since the early 1800s, I know. The Reinhardt family and the Hiltons were up there way back in the early 1800s. I knew that my great grandfather, my grandfather, and my father at some time, had dug along this stream here called the Pond Branch, and I just thought there might be clay here, so I rented a backhoe and came down here and just dug, dug down, and sure enough, I found it, first dig. I didn't have to go anywhere else. And I've been using it now off and on, well I've been using it continuously over 10 years, except that I dig right out of here.
So it's, it's, it's this area probably has a complete layer under it. It just depends on, on just way under the ground. And down here, as we come down toward this stream, we get down lower and I don't have to dig off as much overburden. If I dug way up on the hill, I might have to dig 20 feet of overburden to get to it. Yeah right here is where I dug the last time. Right in this area here. And it's been long enough, it's grown up. You see that depression. I had to go down about six feet to get the overburden off of it and then dug the clay out. I probably got 25 tons. And, and then I put the overburden back in there, so now it's just sort of a sunken place. Most of the pottery that's made here, indeed probably 99% of it, is made from clays that are bought, that are processed made by commercial clay processors. And indeed most of my pieces currently, I make out of clay that I buy, commercial clay. But I wanna just carry on the old tradition. The reason I don't dig all of it, is right now with the setup that I use to process it, it probably costs me $1.50 a pound to do it, dig it and process it myself in terms of time and effort, machinery, and all that. Whereas I can buy it for 21 and a half cents a pound delivered on the lot ready to be used. Business wise it's just better for me to buy it. I often use the local stuff for very special projects that I do for people who want something special. As I just did with the University of North Carolina, they wanted me to do a series of crocks, milk crocks, like one that was dug up in an archeological dig there on the campus of the University of North Carolina. They wanted me, and indeed I suggested that we use a local clay, and that local glaze, that crawdad glaze that I make, and make it more like the way the older piece would have been. Get my hands dry and reach down and get a hold of it. See it's bigger than the first one. It's sort of a tradition in the old pottery families to start the "young'uns," or the small ones, when they're, when they're young, and I started when I was about 10 years old to making pottery on the wheel and my boys did the same. They may have even started younger. They were just always around it with me. And so they are both now potters and they would be 6th generation Luck potters.
- My first few years of turning pottery, I was very frustrated, and maybe that was, I didn't have a lot of patience then. I've developed a lot of patience since then, possibly through learning to turn pottery. But I would turn a couple pieces. I turned some really horrible things, and I was always very hard on myself for what I made. Because I couldn't turn, I really blamed myself for it. And dad really couldn't, he couldn't encourage me enough to make me come back sometimes. I'd quit turning for a week or two and then come back a little bit later, turn something bad, get frustrated, come back. And that would go on. That went on for about five years or so. And I learned to turn, and I learned to turn pieces of pottery, but they just weren't very good. And I suppose during that five years of off and on turning, I finally developed some sort of skill, because I guess around age 16 or 17 or so, I started getting better at it. And I started, I suddenly realized I could turn larger jugs, which I always measured my skills as a potter by what sort of jug I could turn. And I realized I could turn larger jugs and I could make them with a better shape. And that encouraged me. And then I, it was sort of a snowball effect, positive feedback. I turned better jugs and that encouraged me to turn more jugs and more jugs. And finally I am where I am today, where I'm a much better potter than I was two years ago, last year, three, four months ago. I really don't like to do the dinnerware and the, the pie plates and the coffee mugs. Those are good items to sell for money, but what I'd like to make are things that my family started making. They may not be very profitable. I may not sell many of them, but I love to make jugs. I'd like to make large jugs, churns, crocks, even continue on with some things my parents, my family probably never made were like face jugs and those ugly old roosters and folk art sort of pieces. I remember a long time ago, I turned some saucers for dad and they were bad. They were very thin saucers. And what happens when a piece is very thin sometimes, is it'll a warp while it's firing. Some of these saucers were warped in the most unusual way. Some of those we're so twisted. Some of them the bottoms bowed down, so when you sat them down, they rolled on the table. And I had probably about eight or nine of those things and we set them down and put them out for sale, a dollar a piece, and some lady from Chicago, I don't know if this says anything about people from Chicago, but some lady from Chicago came and bought every one of them. And I suppose they were, she thought they were quaint. Maybe she thought they were attractive, but I certainly thought they were worth throwing in the woods somewhere.
- [Sid] I would like to see it carried on, the family tradition, since I'm the fifth generation, I'd like to see it go on as long as possible. Hopefully and I'm sure one of them probably right now, Jason's always said that he was gonna come back here and do pottery that at some point, right now he's in college, studying computer programming. Matthew is in school at the community college-- Montgomery Community College--studying forest management. He's gonna start looking for a job in the summer working somewhere outdoors and so he'll be available to work on a part-time basis.
- [Son] I enjoy coming home to turn. I don't enjoy the social life around here, which a person of my age sort of needs a social life. And out here, it's just a nice, quiet, quiet area to live. And unfortunately that's not what a 21 year old, 20 year old, 19 year old needs.
- Sort of a small-town-like environment. However nowadays there are so many people that it's not nearly as small town as it used to be. Not too long ago, I remember I was going to Seagrove with Matthew or one of the boys, and we pulled up at this old Triangle Service Station and we had to wait on cars. And I think it was about five or six cars went by before I could get out past the stop sign. And I turned to my boy and I said, "You know that is a sign of the change that's going on around here, because when I was your age," I said to him, "I could of pulled up to this stop sign, and chances are, I wouldn't have seen a soul. But if I had, I would have known who it was and probably where they were going." And the people that we saw, I had no idea who they were or where they were going. Every piece of pottery is a unique entity and doing pottery the way we do it, there's no way that anybody even in their lifetime could make so many thousands and thousands of pieces that it would be considered to be widespread. So even in a lifetime, a potter would only make a limited number of pieces. So it's very collectible and there is a lot of interest in collecting. And a lot of interest seems like in getting back to Mother Earth and you know how you can't get any closer to Mother Earth than with a piece of pottery. I'm gonna do it up until the day I die. I'm planning on it anyway. As long as I'm able to get up to a wheel and do the work, I'm gonna do it. If I can live to be as old as my dad, maybe by the time my sons come along and get toward middle age and wanna take over and do that, you know, the majority of things, I could work with them, and then maybe my wife and I take off, and go here and go there and then come back, but still I planned to continue it as long as I live. A medicine bottle.
- I wanted him to stay on in the classroom, but he wanted to get out here on his own. He's happy and I reckon that what counts, whether there is that much-- I noticed the teachers now they're gonna raise their salaries to about $41--$42,000 a year.
