Burlon B. Craig
During the 1950′s and 1960′s, the long line of potters from central North Carolina thinned to one man: Burlon B. Craig (1914 to 2002). Craig’s persistence, skill, adaptability and willingness to instruct a new generation saved the Catawba Valley pottery tradition. Today, over 20 contemporary potters around Hickory, North Carolina, owe their livelihood to him.
Craig began his pottery career in the Great Depression when pottery was far from decorative. His jugs, jars, flower pots, milk crocks, chicken waterers and spittoons were the essentials of rural existence. Then a one-gallon jug sold for ten cents. As recently as the early 1980′s, his utilitarian wares were selling for as little as $1 a gallon. That all changed in 1984 when he received the National Folk Heritage Award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Craig embodied the traditional potter of old. His clay was hand-dug from a river bank, turned on a human-powered kick wheel, coated with a green/brown alkaline glaze and burned in a partly buried ground hog kiln. He started marking his wares in 1975 with either a short “BBC” stamp or a longer version, “BB Craig, Vale, NC.”
By the mid-1970′s, Craig had resurrected an idea he tried earlier in his career: the face jug. No one was buying those grotesque creations when he first started making them in the 1940′s, but as pottery became more decorative so did faces. Although Craig borrowed the face jug from mid-19th century Edgefield, South Carolina, potters, it became associated with him. His faces were always distinctive. Later ones had pupil-less eyes high on the jug, one row of broken china teeth, a single eyebrow, and elongated ears. His early faces have two rows of teeth; the earliest have no teeth, no eyelids and a scratch mouth.
Another innovation Craig borrowed was swirl, the interlacing of light and dark clay popularized in the Catawba Valley in the early-1930′s.
Reference note by p4A Contributing Editor Pete Prunkl.