Piedmont Pit Stops: How Seagrove became America's pottery capital

Just one hour from Winston-Salem there’s a kind of Disney World for pottery enthusiasts — the tiny town of Seagrove.

Over 50 ceramics studios have set up shop in the area, selling vases, mugs and dishes in every style and color imaginable. Since the 18th century, potters have flocked to Seagrove in part for its rich clay soil.

For this installment of Piedmont Pit Stops, WFDD’s April Laissle took a ride through the pottery highway to learn more about the traditions that built the town. 

Getting Inspired

In a dusty studio stacked with earthen ceramics, Eck McCanless sits at his pottery wheel. He’s working a large ball of clay into a cone. 

“The centering process starts with squeezing at the bottom, driving that clay upwards,” he narrates. 

He’s making a vase using his signature agateware technique – it’s a way of throwing multiple colored pieces of clay together to create a marbling pattern. When the piece first comes off the wheel, it’s coated in a layer of mud obscuring the colors. But once he carves into it, a technicolor geode-like pattern appears. 

“I really appreciate the metaphor of finding the beauty under the surface kind of thing," he says. "Much like all of us, you know, just delve a little deeper, find what's beautiful about it.”

Several people have gathered around to watch the magic, including Minneapolis resident Allyssa Tipton. 

“I've been doing pottery for almost three years," she says. "So we're out here visiting Seagrove today to get inspired and see what's out here.”

Centuries of History

Tipton’s story isn’t unique — over 8,000 visitors from across the U.S. and 20 other countries visited the town last year to learn more about the ceramics traditions that began in Seagrove centuries ago. Native Americans were the region’s first potters, but European settlers followed suit in the 1700s.   

“They quickly discovered that not only did the Piedmont have great soils, it also has great clays for making things out of," says Lindsey Lambert, the director of the North Carolina Pottery Center. "And that's really how North Carolina and, in particular, the Piedmont region around Seagrove was able to develop such a rich pottery tradition.”

During a tour of the exhibits at the center, Lambert says early on, potters were mostly focused on utilitarian pieces. 

“What we're looking at here is currently a large-scale diorama of what would have been the inside of a potter shop, and we have some wonderful two-handled jug forms, as well as milk crocks and storage crocks as well.”

The pieces are pretty bare bones, with no swirling patterns in sight. But when glass and metal became cheaper during the Industrial Revolution, those utilitarian pieces began falling out of fashion. So, Seagrove potters pivoted to what’s known as art pottery. 

“People in the early 1900s were looking for things with color and pop and art pottery certainly was able to deliver on that," he says. "You have everything from fairly bright reds to yellows and oranges. You know, it's really kind of a rainbow of colors.”

The transition happened right as tourists started to flock to North Carolina, and Seagrove potters knew they’d be looking for souvenirs. Items like honey jugs became ubiquitous around the state’s tourist destinations, and business took off. 

“They’d ask their families and their friends where they'd got these interesting pieces of pottery, and that helped drive and build that mystique of the Seagrove area.”

Competing for Beauty

By the 1990s, over 100 different potters had settled within a 15-mile radius of Seagrove, including Eck McCanless’ parents. Back at his studio, he tells us they spent time learning new techniques from their neighbors and then passed them on to him — another Seagrove tradition. 

“I was four years old when she put me on her lap and used my little hands as tools," McCanless says. "I managed to make spin rests and ashtrays and all these important things for four-year-olds.”

McCanless worked for his parents at Dover Pottery for nearly 20 years before starting his own studio, one of a few second-generation shops in Seagrove. Many of his closest friends are potters too, and he says they’ve formed a tight-knit, and non-competitive community in the town. 

“We compete for the beauty, not the dollar," he says. "That's the best way I can describe it. We dearly love these people because of the art they make, and the person they are.”

McCanless says those relationships often result in more diverse art, pushing each potter to experiment with new techniques and styles. That’s clear just from spending an hour window shopping around town. 

The overall pottery community has gotten smaller in Seagrove over the years. There are now about half as many studios in the town than during its peak. But officials say they had a resurgence of visitors after the pandemic, and many of them have taken an interest not just in buying pottery, but in learning how to make it too.