Playing in the Mud with Seagrove Potters!

In case you don't know, Seagrove, North Carolina, has been famous for it's pottery for hundreds of years.

Last weekend, the EENC Conference Chair, Lois Nixon, took me to Seagrove. It was really fun to hang out with people who love playing with damp, squishy mud as much as I do!  Can you believe they were making cereal bowls out of that clay? Lois was there to look for bowls for you to purchase and use at the conference. These will save on disposable bowls, which makes the sustainability chair Mickey Jo Sorrell very happy, and will give you a piece of North Carolina to take home with you.  

As you can see in the photo, I was very interested in how they make bowls out of mud—you can also meet my new friend, Suzanne, in the Artists’ Corner at the conference.

I really learned a lot of new stuff about mud last weekend. Those potters have been making bowls, face jugs (can’t remember if those jugs hold spirits or scare off spirits!), bird houses, dinnerware, Christmas ornaments, pie plates, decorative wall tiles, and much more for over 200 years. A few of the people we met  are descendants of the potters who came to Seagrove in the 1700’s to dig up good dirt and mud and clay for making pots and bowls.  Some of the potters still use that local mud for pots and glazes.

About 100 potteries are along a highway way out in the country.  We would see their signs by the highway and then have a long way to go down their dirt driveway to get to the place where we could see and buy their pottery.  It was like a treasure hunt.  Most of them live in very old historic houses, and make the pottery in the barns or sheds. I met a tiny baby five-lined skink with a neon-blue tail on the way to one of the pottery barns. 

After the potters make the mud into a bowl shape, it dries, then they “fire” it in a “kiln” to get all the water out and harden it before the colorful glazes are added (these are all new words for me).  

I peeked into one of the kilns. It is a big brick room, where they stack the bowls and pots on shelves, then use wood (or gas or electricity) to make a really hot fire --

1700º F or more.  After the pots cool, the next step is for the potter to mix up their special secret recipes for glazes and dip or brush on the glaze, then stack the pots back in the kiln again, and heat the kiln to about 2000º F to melt the glaze onto the pot.  I would not be peeking into the kiln when that firing was going on!  It might scorch my shell!  The potters said the fire even shoots out between the bricks—in ancient times in the Orient, this caused these outdoor kilns on the hillside to be called “dragon kilns.”  I think dragons might be my ancestors! 

After the pots and bowls cool down in the kiln for a whole day, the potters open the kiln door to see their art work!  Sometimes it is a big surprise….good or bad!  We found lots of beautiful cereal bowls on our shopping trip, and here I am, trying to decide which one I want.  Which is your favorite?  We’ll save some of these just for you to buy to use for your breakfast each morning at the conference.                       

By the way, that breakfast is going to be healthy granola (yummm), yogurt (think I’ll skip that), and fresh NC fruit from the Farmers’ Market.  Your choices will be fresh apples and pears grown in the NC mountains, fresh peaches and figs grown in the sandhills of NC, or fresh raspberries and grapes grown on the coastal plain.  You’ll have to hurry to beat me to those fresh raspberries each morning.

Stay tuned for more travels!

Tryon T. Turtle