Great and Noble Jar: Traditional Stoneware of South Carolina [Paperback]

CINDA K. BALDWIN has worked as registrar at McKissick Museum, the University of South Carolina. Her research for this project was supported by McKissick Museum and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The publication of this volume was supported in part by McKissick Museum.

In Great and Noble Jar, Cinda K. Baldwin offers the first authoritative study of South Carolina stoneware and traces the ways in which a rich regional tradition emerged from a unique cultural source.

As Baldwin notes, South Carolina's old legislative district of Edgefield (an area now comprising Edgefield, Aiken, and Greenwood counties) has long been recognized as the place of origin for an alkaline-glazing process that came to characterize pottery produced throughout the lower South. The process developed during the early nineteenth century after the poisonous properties of lead-glazed stoneware became known. Abner Landrum, a newspaper editor and scientific farmer, was probably the first to combine locally available materials with Chinese glaze formulas to produce this new and safer alkaline-glazed stoneware.

The plantation operations of the Edgefield District, Baldwin shows, created a demand for large-scale food storage and preservation, often in containers of huge capacity. In response to this need, an extensive system of family-owned stoneware factories emerged. Reflecting the contributions of the many slaves and freed blacks who worked in the industry, the objects produced in these factories often incorporated African designs and techniques. Particularly notable were the "grotesques," or "voodoo jugs"—wheel-thrown vessels onto which the slave potters applied facial features in molded clay. Baldwin pays special attention to the remarkable work of a slave potter named Dave, who marked his wares with brief verse inscriptions, including this one found on a large food-storage conl³B