From Baltimore to the South Carolina Backcountry: Thomas Chandler's Influence on 19th-century Stoneware

摘要

IN THE WINTER of 1980, during a tour of homes in my town, I saw for the first time an alkaline-glazed jug. It was dark olive green with rivulets of dripped glaze running down on all sides. The glaze reminded me of the candles my mother loved that would melt down to nothing during supper and, in the process, cover the old wine bottle we used for a holder with layers of different-colored dripped wax. The alkaline-glazed jug was from a region in North Carolina known as the Catawba Valley, and its elegance struck me to the core. "It is unfortunate," I said to my host, "that such a wonderful example of nineteenth-century stoneware could not have been made in South Carolina." "You're so wrong," my friend informed me. "Extraordinary stoneware was made in South Carolina, at a place called Edgefield" (fig. 1).