Craft at a Prodigious Scale

Abstract

American pottery manufacturers of refined earthenwares and porcelain faced a number of challenges in attempting to develop their operations during the late 1700s and early 1800s. The American pottery industry was dispersed geographically and struggled to compete against those greater economies of scale enjoyed by British manufacturers. From 1850 onward, American producers expanded significantly, evolving rapidly from artisan production to increasingly mechanized factories, particularly in locations such as Trenton, New Jersey, and East Liverpool, Ohio. Yet, decades before the start of that trend, the Landrums of Edgefield, South Carolina, initiated ambitious innovations in their potteries in the backcountry. The innovation and development of alkaline-glazed stoneware pottery in America was introduced by these potteries in the nineteenth century. They employed enslaved African American laborers and later free African Americans. Documentary evidence indicates that many enslaved Africans were brought to this area of pottery production throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, providing newly arrived cultural influences from societies targeted by the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Edgefield potteries present fascinating research questions of understanding technological innovations and investigating the impacts of African American, European-American, and Asian manufacturing traditions and knowledge on a rural enterprise and its cultural landscape.