DanielSeagle.com

"A 70-Year Tradition of Pottery Making in the Catawba Valley"

LIFE IN THE BACKCOUNTRY, ALONG THE CATAWBA RIVER

Daniel Seagle and the Seagle "School" of potters based their pottery production in Vale, N.C., a small, rural community in western Lincoln County in the Catawba River Valley (about 20 miles west of Lincolnton, N.C., and 20 miles south of Hickory, N.C.).  Their kiln site, no longer standing, is on private property
near Trinity Lutheran Church (right  photo).

The Seagles were among the German Lutherans who came from Pennsylvania, down the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road,
to settle in the Catawba River Valley.

In the last 16 years of the colonial era, southbound traffic on the Great Wagon Road was numbered in the tens of thousands.  It was the most heavily traveled road in all of America and had perhaps more traffic than all of the other main roads together.

The Catawba River flows for 225 miles, from near Mt. Mitchell in N.C. to Lake Wateree, east of Columbia, S.C.  It offers habitat for 50 fish, 160 bird, and 120 river species. Historical evidence suggests that when the Seagles arrived in the region, Catawba bottomlands may have contained six or eight feet of topsoil!  The Catawba River Valley also had rich clay pits, which the Catawba Indians used many years before what anthropologists call "The European Invasion."  Therefore, it's easy to see why this area's abundant food, water and clay appealed so much to the early settlers.

                                Cornfield in Vale, N.C.

Historical reenactors at an event at Ft. Dobbs State Historic Site in the N.C. Backcountry in Statesville.

THE POTTERY TRADITION OF THE CATAWBA INDIANS

The Seagles, however, were not the first potters to settle in the Catawba River Valley.  The Catawba Indians, most of whom live near Rock Hill, S.C., today, were the frst inhabitants, occupying the land as early as the mid-16th century.  The Catawba Cultural Preservation Project (CCPP) notes that Spanish explorers mention the word "Catawba" in written accounts from that time.  (The spelling that early was "Katapa" or "Kataba," and translates as "fork in a river.")

And, according to www.CCPPCrafts.com, "Scholars tell us that the Catawba pottery tradition has survived for over 4,500 years, long before the craft made its debut in the Southwest.  Catawba pottery is hand-built, burnished, and fired using primitive techniques.  The pottery tradition has remained as one of the purest art forms of its kind."

--Photo courtesy of Museum of Anthropology at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, N.C.