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Seagrove hosts 26th annual pottery festival |
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Thursday, 15 November 2007 |
by ALLISON CASEY
Lifestyles Reporter
Ranging from traditional Redware and modern iridescent glazes to the utilitarian and decorative, the pottery town of Seagrove showcases a wide variety of local, North Carolina craftsmanship.
Held annually, The Seagrove Pottery Festival draws in crowds from all over the world.
This year’s festival will be held at the Seagrove Elementary School in the town of Seagrove from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday and Sunday.
Tickets are $6 each day and advanced ticket sales are available for groups of 15 or more.
“This is our 26th year,” festival chairmen and president of the Museum
of North Carolina Traditional Pottery, Richard Gillson said. “And we’ve
never had a bad one.”
The festival was started by the Museum of North Carolina Traditional
Pottery as a way to bring local potters and community members together.
The Southeast Tourism Society recently named The Seagrove Pottery Festival one of the top 20 events in the Southeast.
This year, the festival expands to include 90 potters and 30 traditional craftspeople.
“We don’t allow modern crafts, for example tie-dyed t-shirts,” he said.
“We only allow traditional, colonial crafts like blacksmithing,
tinsmithing and things that were done years ago.”
One craftswoman who comes to the festival creates textiles with wool she hand-sheared and dyed with natural berries.
Gillson said each year collectors from all over the country and world come to the festival.
“We’ve already had calls from Germany, Canada, Texas, Connecticut and Georgia,” he said.
The town of Seagrove, with a population of just 300 people, came to be
a thriving pottery community because of the rich clay in the area.
“Not all clay is good for pottery. There is an abundance of good clay
here,” he said. “There was also good pine wood for kiln fires.”
The area was originally along “the plank road,” a road that stretched
from near modern day Greensboro to Winston-Salem and acted as a means
of transportation and trade in the 18th century.
As glass containers became more popular for storage, utilitarian
pottery became obsolete and many traditional potteries were forced to
close their doors.
Tourists from the North who wanted strictly decorative pottery eventually revived the industry in the early 20th century.
Today in Seagrove, the tradition is alive and well with a strong
community of craftspeople, some of them eight and ninth generation
potters.
On June 7, 2005, the General Assembly of North Carolina officially
designated Seagrove as the birthplace of traditional North Carolina
pottery.
Seagrove is located about 40 miles south of Greensboro and about two and a half hours from Boone.
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