photo: Mary Anne McDonald

Burlon Craig

Art Form: Folk/Traditional Crafts and Visual Arts

Vale, NC

 

About Burlon Craig

Pottery-making is one of mankind's oldest and most essential craft traditions. In North America, the molding and firing of clay has been performed for several millennia, and began with the many Native American cultures that were present on the continent centuries before the arrival of European and British colonists. With the settlement of immigrants from abroad, the technique of wheel-thrown or turned pottery production was introduced to the "new world."

By the mid18th century, Anglo- and German-American potters in North Carolina were producing earthenware jugs, jars, crocks, and other vessels used primarily for food storage and cooking. The Carolina Piedmont was the principle center of pottery production two-hundred years ago, and the Moravians, who settled near present-day Winston-Salem, were potters of the greatest reputation. They produced a variety of earthenware forms, which they decorated with spectacular multi-colored floral designs. In the area that comprises Randolph, Moore, and Chatham counties, a tradition of salt-glazed stoneware evolved to serve the farm community, and in the Catawba Valley, below Hickory, the use of an alkaline-based glaze identified the stoneware of rural potters from this region.

Pottery-making remained a mostly part-time profession up until the early part of this century. After 1900, technological advancements brought improvements in food preservation methods, which lessened the demand for crockery. In North Carolina, a number of production potters responded to the change by developing a new line of smaller, decorative table and horticultural ware.

Today the production pottery tradition is stronger than ever in North Carolina and has produced dozens of exceptionally proficient "turners and burners." Burlon Craig, of rural Lincoln County, exemplified the best--and perhaps last--of the 19th century-style farmer-potter tradition. He grew up in the heart of the alkaline-glazed stoneware territory in the Catawba Valley and learned pottery-making by apprenticing himself to a neighbor. By age fifteen, he was setting out his own ware with the other potters of the area. In 1945, he purchased his home, shop, and kiln from potter Harvey Reinhardt.

As pottery scholar Charles Zug noted before Mr. Craig's death in 2002, his "materials and methods are little changed from those he first learned over 50 years ago. He digs his clay from bottomland on the South Fork of the Catawba River...still works on a treadle-wheel...crushes the glass [for the glaze solution] in a water-powered trip-hammer mill built across a branch at the bottom of his pasture...and burns the pottery in his huge [wood-fired] groundhog kiln." He accomplished it all with the steadfast support of his wife Irene.

In 1983, Mr. Craig received the National Heritage Fellowship Award, an honor bestowed by the National Endowment for the Arts, but his reputation was already firmly established. A kiln opening at the Craig shop attracted hundreds of collectors, who depleted his inventory in a matter of a few minutes. A man of great warmth and modesty, Mr. Craig looked upon the spectacle with a mixture of amazement and perplexity. "Sometimes I just get to studying," he said, "I sort of hate that some of the old people weren't still living to see what it amounted to. They worked at it all their lives and didn't have anything, didn't make anything out of it. I just wish they could have lived to see it like it is today."