A Brief History of North Georgia Pottery
Pioneer potters settled along the fall line and in the Piedmont where the relatively pure stoneware clay was concentrated. They were in business to provide fellow farmers with such sturdy vessels as jugs to store whiskey and cane syrup, churns to make butter and buttermilk, and jars to preserve vegetables, fruit, and meat. Before modern refrigeration and the availability of glass and metal containers, these wares were essential to Georgia's rural lifestyle.
Georgia's first known potter was Andrew Duché, who made experimental porcelain, earthenware, and stoneware in Savannah between 1738 and 1741. Georgia folk pottery came into its own in the early 1800s, when potters from the Carolinas introduced a distinctly regional stoneware tradition that became the norm for the state. In the North, salt was thrown in the kiln to glaze stoneware but in South Carolina's Edgefield district, across the Savannah River from Augusta, alkaline stoneware glazes were developed by Dr. Abner Landrum in about 1815. These glazes depend on an alkaline substance—wood ashes or lime—to help melt the other readily available ingredients: clay and an additional silica source such as sand. The glaze turns either green or brown when its iron content reacts to the kiln atmosphere.
The oldest northeast Georgia pottery center, Mossy Creek in the foothills of southern White County, began in the 1820s with the migration of potters from North Carolina. This was also Georgia's largest pottery center and home of the famous Meaders Pottery, launched in 1893. By 1847, Charles Ferguson had opened Jug Factory near present-day Statham in Barrow County. Fed by potters from Jug Factory and Mossy Creek, a final center blossomed during the 1880s at Gillsville in Hall County.
Beginning in the early 1900’s, Georgia potters faced a number of challenges that endangered the survival of the craft. The 1907 state prohibition shut down distillers and cut the demand for whiskey jugs. Mass production of glass and metal containers eliminated the need for many stoneware vessels. The Great Depression was the final blow for many traditionally trained potters. A few kept their hands in clay by adopting strategies to weather these changes such as concentrating production on unglazed garden ware and marketing to tourist.
In 1920 Cheever Meaders inherited the family pottery at Mossy Creek; a year later his brother Cleater set up a shop in nearby Cleveland. As local demand for food-related wares declined, tourists and crafts enthusiasts became their main customers. In the late 1950s Cheever's wife, Arie, taught herself to throw and developed an imaginative line of colorful wares, including wheel-thrown birds and animals, to appeal to this outside market. Their son, Lanier Meaders (1917-98) took over the shop in 1967 and revitalized the tradition of jugs with applied faces. His success encouraged others in the region to carry on the craft today.
