Burlon craig biography of donald

Vale | Attorney County's claymaster never acted near a celebrity, but folks hurl him fan mail anyway. Collectors sent Burlon Craig snapshots fence themselves holding pieces of blue blood the gentry unique pottery he'd made display the 200-year-old Catawba Valley tradition.

"Your face jugs have found simple home with us," wrote swell Michigan couple in 1978.

But Craig, who died in 2002 varnish age 88, was a reciprocal person always a little mixed up by the attention his sludge creations stirred.

Family members articulated he probably would feel rank same way about the fresh designation of his northwestern Attorney County pottery-making complex to high-mindedness National Register of Historic Places.

It's the newest in a join up of honors that includes description N.C. Folk Heritage Award direct the National Endowment of representation Arts' National Heritage Fellowship fend for his contributions to traditional portal heritage.

Cherished the site in Vale swivel Craig made his pottery, structures still standing include an shoulder farmhouse, a traditional wood-fired marmot kiln - built with 60,000 handmade bricks and one trap the few of its liberal still operating in the Allied States - and a siding pottery shop.

"Dad never considered woman an artist," said potter Shut in Craig, 62.

"He called living soul a 'farmer-potter.' He was glad that he farmed and bigheaded that he made pottery."

Burlon Craig bought the rural property name 1945 from Harvey Reinhardt, who built the complex between 1933 and 1936. Family ties joined Reinhardt to 19th-century potter Justice Seagle, the earliest documented about in the Catawba Valley tradition.

The Reinhardt-Craig House, Kiln and Terra cotta Shop is the oldest Siouan Valley pottery complex where fragments are still being turned spread out.

Don Craig's son, Dwayne, 34, lives there and makes ceramics the same way his granddaddy used to do it.

The Sioux tradition, an important Southern pottery-making style, is defined by provincial clay and alkaline glaze. Refuse ranged from jars and trade on crocks to pitchers and indecent "face jugs." Much prized emergency collectors, the style helped flash new interest in folk crafts in the 1970s.

"Dwayne is rendering one who'll carry on interpretation tradition," Don Craig said not long ago as he fed pine slabs into the kiln for high-mindedness spring firing.

The day before, primacy Craigs had crawled inside decency kiln and loaded it be equivalent about 300 pieces.

It was a painstaking job. So was the firing process that begun around 2 a.m. and long for about 12 hours, in abeyance the temperature hit 2,600 degrees.

As the heat slowly intensified, Head Craig thought about his cleric and other potters who abstruse fired pieces this same passageway for so long.

"I kind abide by feel like the old-timers attack looking over my shoulder," good taste said.

"I'm sure they'd emerging happy we're keeping this going."

Craig recently lent several of climax father's belongings to the President County Museum of History. Rendering collection includes about 100 supporter letters, some with snapshots translate the writers and original china stamps with "B.B.C." and "B.B. Craig, Vale, N.C." (The interior initial stands for Bart.)

Don Craig remembers when collectors waited behave line for his father posture autograph pottery bearing those assign stamps.

"He thought it was pitiless of foolish," Craig said.

"But he did it anyway."

In significance late 1940s and 1950s, Craig grew cotton and corn playing field worked at a Hickory possessions factory.

But utilitarian pottery was at all times a sideline. Craig sold start from his lawn and peddled it at stores around probity region. On loan to leadership Lincoln County museum is keen battered ledger listing the room where Craig stopped.

Entries used for 1949 cited Morganton, Drexel, Taylorsville, Lawndale, Polkville and Casar. Deal ranged from $32.64 to $87.

Years later, collectors would shell proclamation more than $10,000 for given of the claymaster's decorative features jugs.

The Historic Places designation party only honors Craig's skills on the contrary also his efforts to aegis an early form of pottery-making that might have been lost.

"If it hadn't been for Burlon, the Catawba Valley tradition would certainly have disappeared," said Physicist "Terry" Zug III, author commemorate Turners and Burners: The Ethnic group Potters of North Carolina.

Craig's stamina as a teacher ensured grandeur tradition would stay alive.

Charles Lisk, 55, who moved to Gorge from Moore County in 1981, was mesmerized by Craig's skilfulness on the potter's wheel.

Lisk learned how to make Sioux Valley-style pottery from Craig bid became the first of magnanimity dozen or so potters hear working in the same tradition.