The Edgefield potteries, or Edgefield District, was the name of an area of pottery production located in Edgefield, Aiken and Greenwood counties and near the town of Edgefield, in west-central South Carolina. Edgefield is known as the "crossroads of clay": the potters there blended English, European continental, African and Native American pottery traditions with Chinese slips, glazes and kilns to produce original, durable and nontoxic alternatives to lead-glazed ceramic vessels.
In its heyday in the mid-19th century, Edgefield was a collection of industrial workshops which sprang from the stoneware manufacturing brothers Abner and John Landrum. The Landrums came from a long line of potters: their father Samuel was associated with potters in North Carolina before he settled in Edgefield District in the late 1700s.
First Workshops at Edgefield
The first two workshops opened in 1815, and they produced stoneware vessels for storing food and drink. Right from the start, Abner Landrum used alkaline glazing, slip decorations and firing techniques unique to the North American continent, but invented by Han Dynasty Chinese pottery manufacturers over two thousand years ago. Landrum's information concerning the Chinese techniques is believed to have come from the early 18th century letters of the French Jesuit missionary Pere D'Entrecolles, who was stationed at the town of Jingdezhen during the early 1700s (Qing Dynasty). Jingdezhen was, and still is, considered one of the most important pottery production centers in China, and it is best known for its remarkable jade-like porcelains. D'Entrecolles described the porcelains, glazes and kilns used by the Jingdezhen potters in detail, and the Landrums (apparently) used that detail to build kilns and make stoneware.
The Chinese inspired innovation of lime-based alkaline glazes were to become standard on stoneware vessels. Alkaline glazes turn different colors depending on their distance from the heat source, and when fired in kilns built to withstand and sustain high temperatures, vessels produced with it are hard, easy to clean and durable. Vessel forms from Edgefield have European, particularly German and British antecedents, and African influenced pottery forms, including stirrup-shaped handles and sculpted faces.
Eventually, Edgefield grew to include 12 pottery factories, each run by a relative or partner of the Landrums. Major factories included the Pottersville Stoneware Manufactory, John Landrum Pottery, Colin Rhodes Factory, Lewis Miles Factory, Miles Mills, and the Phoenix Factory, among others.
Dave the Potter
While the European and Asian influence on the potteries is intriguing, the Native American and African influences on Edgefield has a more sinister source: the manufacturers employed slaves to create pottery. One famous employee of the factories was Dave the Potter, known as David Drake after the American emancipation, who produced a remarkable corpus of pots under several of the business owners, and was allowed to sign and date his creations. Dave's pots also include snippets of poetry, and many of his surviving jars are kept in museums throughout the world.
Dave was born in slavery on the Edgefield district about 1800, and he lived there under at least five different masters, including (possibly) both John and Abner Landrum. He worked as a "turner" for each of these men, learning his craft and eventually incorporating some of his own elements of decoration.
Some of Dave's designs were among the largest stoneware pots ever made. Although Dave was one of at least 76 known enslaved African American men and women who worked in Edgefield, Dave is the only one known to have been allowed to signed his name and the date of manufacture on some of his pots.
Decline of Edgefield
The Edgefield district began to decline in the 1850s, as some of the best known white potters left the region to start their own businesses. Pottery continued to be made after emancipation, with the help of freedmen including Dave Drake, but by 1900 stoneware production had all but ended. The technique of using alkaline glazes, however, was carried into Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas by the 1850s, and is still used by folk potters in Georgia and North Carolina.
Archaeology at Edgefield
In 2011, Christopher Fennell, George Calfas, Carl Steen, and Sean Taylor at the University of Illinois began a series of collaborative field schools at Pottersville in Edgefield, the site of the first stoneware production facility in the Edgefield district. Fennell excavated the kiln and related production areas, and discovered that the kiln was made in the form of a Chinese-style "dragon" kiln.
This kiln, excavated during the summer of 2011, proved to be 105 feet (32 meters) long and 12 ft (3.6 m) wide. Excavations identified a linear barrel vault, with a firebox at one end, a chimney, internal flues for channeling fire and heat, ware chambers and partitions. Fennell estimates that each firing required 100 cords of wood or more and nearly a week to cmplete the process.
Sources
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