A family legacy, fired in clay
Show in Seguin will celebrate pottery crafted by freed slaves 143 years ago
CAPOTE— Somehow it seems fitting that the waster pits of the old Wilson pottery resemble human graves. Mounded with shattered stoneware, flanking earthen piles that hide kilns abandoned more than 100 years ago, they speak of the mystery of the freed slaves who, settling southeast of Seguin, built with their clay caked hands the first known black- owned business in Texas.
Once, the potters’ earth colored jugs, jars and churns were only the hum- drum necessities of daily life. When new, they sold for less than $ 1. Today, though, the stoneware— tucked away in attics, garages and farmyards— brings up to $ 20,000 from connoisseurs of vintage Texana. The best specimens are exhibited amid relics of blue- blooded pedigree at the state’s leading museums.
Next Saturday, choice pieces from more than a dozen private collections will be on view at the Wilson Pottery Show, held in conjunction with Seguin’s annual pecan festival. In January, a portion of the town’s historic Sebastopol House will be christened the Wilson Pottery Museum, a venue for historic and contemporary ceramics.
Central to both the new museum and its sponsoring Wilson Pottery Foundation is LaVerne Britt, an 84- year- old retired San Antonio school teacher who traces her ances--
try to HiramWilson, the figurehead entrepreneur of the Capote pottery.
Like many other members of her extended clan, Britt had reached middle age before she recognized, thanks to an exhibit at San Antonio’s Institute of Texan Cultures, the significance of the stoneware that cluttered her childhood.
‘ Chill bumps all over’
“There still was a lot of pottery around when I was growing up,” she said. “We never knew it was such a unique thing. We didn’t know to appreciate pots.”
Sometimes, she said, the pottery was destroyed intentionally.
On first encountering Wilson stoneware in a museum setting, Britt, HiramWilson’s greatgreatgranddaughter, was overwhelmed. “I had chill bumps all overme,” she recalled.
That response is not unusual.
“Collecting is about aesthetics, scarcity and quality,” said George Cushman, a Navasota artist and Texana dealer. “But theWilson pottery has extra zip to it. … HiramWilson looms large. Here is a freedman who has done something that is the American dream.”
Merely holding aWilson pot can send Huntsville collector George Russell into a reverie. “There’s a certain spirituality,” he said. “You can almost sense and feel the spirits of the ancestors. … You can hold one of these pots and close your eyes and imagine. TheWilsons held this very pot and handed it down family to family.”
Michael Brown, curator of Houston’s Bayou Bend Collection, which owns about a dozen Wilson pieces, noted that the black potters, who at times worked side- byside with white artisans, were innovators.
“They weren’t necessarily doing it the way everyone else was doing it at that time,” he said, noting that some of the Wilson pieces featured unusual horseshoeshaped handles. “Making stoneware was a fairly sophisticated process.”
Through almost 50 years of operation under various ownerships at, sequentially, three sites, the potters produced a wide variety of stoneware.
They used salt glazes, typical of northern potteries, as well as the ancient Chinese ash glazes associated with South Carolina’s famed Edgefield District. The result often was mottled finishes in an alluring array of creams, grays and browns.
Making pottery doubtless was superior to share- cropping, the main occupation open to freed slaves, but it was grueling work. Capote potters dug their clay from the banks of a nearby creek, then painstakingly removed stones and twigs before shaping it and firing it in wood- fired kilns. The kilns themselves were constructed of bricks made on site.
Capote’s first pottery was opened in 1857 by the Rev. JohnMcKamey Wilson, a North Carolina Presbyterian minister and educator who had moved to Seguin with his 19 slaves a year earlier.
In 1869, newly freed slave HiramWilson, then about 33, joined with fellow potters JamesWilson andWallaceWilson — the men assumed their former master’s surname, although Hiram and Wallace may have been brothers — in forming H. Wilson & Co.
Fragments of lives
HiramWilson’s influence extended beyond the pottery. He was founding minister at Capote Baptist Church, preached at Seguin’s Second Baptist Church, promoted construction of a Capote school and assembled a sizable tract of land that he made available to former slaves for farming.
When HiramWilson died in 1884, James Wilson joined white and black potters at a new kiln site near Salt Creek. The operation remained in production until 1903.
Academic and collector interest inWilson pottery was spawned by exhibits at San Antonio’s 1968World’s Fair, and by the 1981 publication of Georgianna Greer’s seminal “American Stonewares: The Art & Craft of Utilitarian Potters.” But, descendants of the slave potters found, details of the old artisans’ lives were hard to come by.
Even the spelling of HiramWilson’s name was in doubt. While his wedding certificate bore the generally accepted “Hiram,” his marble gravestone insisted on “Hyrum.”
Helen Embry, 74, JamesWilson’s greatgreatgranddaughter, was born in the old potter’s house.
She recalled workdays at the Capote Cemetery,
Hints of racial violence
Elverlene Johnson, a retired registered nurse and great- greatgranddaughter of Hiram Wilson, recalled tales that hinted of post- reconstruction racial animosity aimed at the potters. “I askedmy dadwhatever happened out here,” she said, “and he said he remembered an explosion at the last kiln site. He said it was just like a stick of dynamite.”
The only way people now living truly would know the old potters’ travails and triumphs, though, Johnson’s father told her, would be to “dig them up and ask them.”