Jugtown Pottery 1917-2017 ― A Century of Art & Craft in Clay

A century ago, a modestly successful Raleigh portrait and landscape painter named Jacques Busbee arrived by train in Seagrove, North Carolina, not knowing that his future, and the history of pottery-making in the state, was about to change forever. Jugtown Pottery 1917-2017 tells the entire story of the founding and success of his and Juliana Royster Busbee’s remarkable folkcraft enterprise. The author’s in-depth research leaves no stone unturned when describing how this improbable venture in a most unlikely setting left its indelible mark on a remote Southern community. Fully illustrated with numerous black-and-white and color photographs of the place, the people who made pottery there, and the pottery produced by them, the book tells how the Busbees convinced a few of rural Moore County’s old-time utilitarian potters to make new-fangled wares for them to sell in Juliana’s Greenwich Village tea room and shop. Following New Yorkers’ wild acceptance of their primitive-looking and alluring pottery offerings, the Busbees built their own workshop and employed their own potters for pottery-making in out-of-the-way Moore County, and called it Jugtown. The shop’s success spurred the creation and advancement of dozens more art potteries in the region with now well-known names like J. B. Cole Pottery, North State Pottery, A. R. Cole Pottery, and Auman Pottery. Today, nearly one hundred potters make and sell their wares within a few miles of Jugtown—all because a hundred years ago, the Busbees and their Jugtown potters found a new way to make old jugs.

Stephen C. Compton is an independent scholar and an avid collector of historic, traditional North Carolina pottery. Steve has written numerous articles and books about the state’s pottery. Widely recognized for his North Carolina pottery expertise, the author is frequently called upon as a lecturer and exhibit consultant and curator. He has served as president of the North Carolina Pottery Center, a museum and educational center located in Seagrove, North Carolina, and is a founding organizer, and former president, of the North Carolina Pottery Collectors’ Guild.