Clete Meaders Folk Art Pottery

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The Meaders family potters' gained popularity as folk potters from operating with the original methods of making pottery. A southern Appalachian craft requiring knowledge to locate quality clay, digging/processing raw clay, turning clay on foot-powered pottery wheel, making alkaline glaze from minerals, firing their ware in brick kilns they built themselves and firing their work in wood-fired ground-hog kils. The craft takes years to acquire and draws interest from those that have respect for the original Appalachian mountain crafts. The Meaders Family kept this southern art form alive.

The Meaders family of potters is probably the most influential family in the history of Southern Appalachian folk pottery. The White County, GA family was featured in Allen Eaton’s 1937 book, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands, and was honored with a special event at the Library of Congress in 1978, when the Smithsonian Institution’s documentary film on the Meaders pottery was released. The ‘face jugs’ created by Lanier Meaders are highly sought by collectors and can fetch as much as $3,000 per jug. In the days before the advent of mass-produced tin cans and glass bottles, before the mechanized commercial dairy and the home refrigerator, the potter functioned as an indispensable adjunct to rural life. Through the nineteenth century, general stores in all parts of the South maintained large stocks of preserving vessels, pitchers, churns, and jugs freighted to them by pottery entrepreneurs. The potters themselves clustered around naturally occurring clay deposits, thereby creating numerous “jugtowns” of a dozen shops and more. While the ceramic product turned out by these potters varied with the area, its clays, its traditions, the basic steps in the production process varied little throughout the South. Most of these men fashioned their own tools with the assistance of local blacksmiths, built their own kilns of homemade bricks, and processed their own clay and glaze materials.