The University of North Carolina Press

Raised in Clay

The Southern Pottery Tradition

By Nancy Sweezy

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Raised in Clay is a remarkable portrait of pottery making in the South, one of the oldest and richest craft traditions in America. Focusing on more than thirty potters in North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, and Kentucky, Nancy Sweezy tells how families preserve and practice the traditional art of pottery making today.

First published in 1984, Sweezy's book documents the last generation of potters to have direct contact with preindustrial pottery traditions. It portrays the personalities of the potters, treating this aspect as carefully as the traditions themselves, and discusses various types of wheels, glazes, and kilns and each potter's specialty pieces. Photographs and line drawings showing potters, their potteries and equipment, examples of finished work, and step-by-step works in progress enhance the text. Sweezy's introductory chapter provides a superb history of southern pottery making. For this edition, she has added a new afterword on recent changes in the potting scene.

About the Author

Nancy Sweezy, a potter for more than thirty-five years, is former director of Jugtown Pottery in Seagrove, North Carolina. She lives in Arlington, Massachusetts, where she is executive director of Country Roads, Inc., and is developing the Armenia Cultural Project.