Edgefield Pottery History

Connections between the Development of Racism on the Eastern Frontier and the Production of Edgefield Pottery

Emily Eckert

HIS400 Spring 2014

Bolin

America’s intense westward expansion required equally intense measures to accommodate the changing national and state populations and economies. In particular, the thriving agricultural economy of the southern states not only retained utilization of slave labor as the principle labor force, but also adapted their labor system to support a burgeoning industrial society. The well-established plantation systems of the South enforced strict authoritative and hierarchical structures between white plantation owners and both unskilled and skilled African American slaves. As such, much of the Southern agricultural and industrial plantation production maintained clear social and economic stratification that seemed to refuse the model of change undergone by the American economy.

One of the more interesting developments within the South originated in the Edgefield county regions of South Carolina. In the early nineteenth century, potters if the area developed and introduced a unique style of ceramics based off an unusual alkaline glaze. Although like all ceramic glazes, the alkaline glaze served both a functional and decorative purpose to a specific piece, this glaze in particular can only be traced back to ancient China, and does not appear in western production until the development of Edgefield pottery. Production centers of this style of ceramics existed solely in the Edgefield region; the south central area of South Carolina, and in few select pockets of settlements in the southern expanses of the Appalachian Mountains that developed as outgrowths of expansion by Edgefield ...

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...de efforts to accommodate issues of southern hierarches to provide to economic demands. Slave artisans maintained the pottery production as a system by which to alter their situation in the pottery industry. Based on the increased slavery/production populations, the growing allowance for artist identification, and the ability to provide profitable pottery with strong African influences, Edgefield ceramics created a new institution of slavery in a plantation-run industrialized context. The evidence of Edgefield pottery production as a separate evolution in the industrialized plantation system appears both in the historical and archaeological record. Changes and differences in the presentation of the various styles and pieces of Edgefield pottery serve as the culminating factor that demonstrates the shift in racial concepts within the community of Edgefield potters.