photo: Roger Haile

Melvin Lee Owens

Art Form: Folk/Traditional Crafts and Visual Arts

Seagrove, NC

 

About Melvin Lee Owens

When pressed to explain how he made a pot, Melvin Owens said matter-of-factly, “Well, you have a shape in your mind and you make it.” At his wheel for more than seventy-five years, he became the consummate production potter, able to turn dozens of pie dishes, vases, and other wares in no time at all and with seemingly little effort. Many of the shapes he made, such as churns and cream risers, were from the Moore and Randolph County pottery tradition. Other shapes were distinctly his own, especially his teapots, tall and graceful with spouts that flow like a swan's neck.

Born in Moore County in 1917, Melvin Owens was from one of the great pottery families of North Carolina. He grew up surrounded by potters who made traditional wares and also had major roles in developing new artistic forms. His uncle Rufus made the “brilliant orange glaze pie plate” said to have inspired the start of Jugtown, and his father, James Henry Owens, helped to build Jugtown and ran his own pottery shop right next door.

When Melvin Owens married Pearl Marie Garner in 1938, they set up shop in the family pottery, developing earthenware glazes and firing salt-glaze wares in his wood-fired groundhog kiln. They began their family in the years during World War II, and most of the eight children eventually learned the craft. Their lives were not easy. As late as the 1960s they fired the kiln three times a week to produce pots and candlesticks that wholesale for between fifteen to seventy-five cents apiece. Potters had to be both innovative and productive to survive, and Melvin found outlets for his wares in tourist and commercial markets as well as local markets.

Mostly self-taught, he generously shared his knowledge of the pottery business with others in the community. In Raised in Clay, Nancy Sweezy wrote, "Potters young and old around the region know that Melvin Owens will help them. He has led people to clay pits and has assisted them in hauling it; helped build wheels, machines, and shops; and in earlier years built kilns all over the countryside.”

Before his death in 2003 at 86, Melvin Owens was widely recognized as the patriarch of potters in the Seagrove region. When his son Vernon, an award winning potter himself, talked about growing up as an Owens, he paid tribute to his father. "I wouldn't trade it for the world. I learned from that experience. And a lot of what he told us —-the way to do and the way to live, and the way to be—-was exactly right."