Jugtown Pottery 1917-2017: A Century of Art and 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.