On a sunny Saturday in the fall of 1997, Hewell’s Pottery in the north Georgia countryside was in the midst of its annual Turning and Burning festival, a homegrown celebration of traditional pottery-making. The guest of honor was Lanier Meaders, arguably America’s most famous folk potter, who had made it to the age of eighty. This was his big birthday party, with hundreds of well-wishers on hand. Lanier had kept alive Georgia’s old alkaline-glazed stoneware tradition virtually single-handed until others, inspired by his success, picked it up and carried it on, and our meeting many years earlier, in 1968, had inspired me to research and write the first in-depth survey of a Southern state’s ceramic heritage.[1]
The Hewell and Meaders “clay clans” of northeast Georgia (the country’s last stronghold, along with North Carolina and Alabama, of Euro-American folk pottery) have maintained ties for nearly a century. William J. Hewell of Gillsville in Hall County did much of his potting at Mossy Creek, fifteen miles to the north, in the Appalachian foothills of White County. It was there, in about 1920, that he introduced the concept of the face jug to Lanier’s father, Cheever Meaders. Hewell probably had acquired the concept from his in-laws, the Fergusons, north Georgia’s first known makers of jugs with modeled faces, who likely had brought the idea from antebellum South Carolina. When face jugs became Lanier’s specialty in the 1970s, earning him a national reputation—and the nickname “Jughead”—his young friend Chester Hewell was prompted to revive his own family’s making of them, bringing the local tradition full circle.
The county-fair atmosphere of Lanier’s birthday bash was tinged with sadness, for he was gravely ill (and would die four months later). Under the big tent the Hewells had set up for the occasion, I was asked to say a few words over the public address system about Lanier and his importance in American ceramics history, after which I fed him a slice of his birthday cake. When he clutched my sleeve from his wheelchair, indicating he had something to tell me, I leaned down to catch his barely audible whisper: “John, you’re Jughead now.” In what otherwise might have been taken as an insult he was conferring on me the honor of his nickname, knowing that soon he would have no need for it.
Belying the stereotype of the isolated country craftsman who never ventured beyond his home community, Lanier Meaders served as a U.S. Army paratrooper in World War II, returning to Mossy Creek from his air base in Britain and combat in Germany. The jug with which his career as a potter was to become inextricably bound took much the same route in its journey to America, some three centuries earlier. I have written about jugs in the context of Georgia’s ceramics history, but the Turning and Burning festival led me to ponder more broadly, as the newly anointed “Jughead,” a clay artifact type that became the quintessential American pot form—even giving rise to an American musical idiom, the jug band—and to attempt to write its life history, much as I had Lanier’s.[2]
Semantic Juggling: What’s Pot-Bellied, Skinny-Necked, One-Armed, Yet Full of Spirit?
In tracing the travels of this seemingly ubiquitous ceramic form, the first order of business is to clarify just what a jug is,[3] a task complicated by different meanings for the term in American and British English. As George Bernard Shaw wryly put it, “England and America are two countries separated by the same language.”[4] In Britain, the word jug can mean either a small pitcher (as in a cream jug for tea) or a wide-mouthed drinking vessel, which, in reference to medieval wares, is tall and often baluster-shaped (really an early tankard).[5] In the United States, however, the term has come to mean a narrow-necked (so it can be stoppered), flat-bottomed (freestanding) vessel for keeping and transporting liquids (although certainly one could drink from it), with one or two vertical loop handles for grasping and pouring (figs. 1, 2). In Britain such a vessel is called a flagon or bottle; what we Americans call a bottle normally lacks a handle. Thus, the subject of the eighteenth-century English poem “The Brown Jug” is an ale mug, whereas the American song “The Little Brown Jug” of a century later refers to a narrow-necked container for distilled spirits.[6] It is the American meaning that this essay addresses.
Peregrinating Pots: Old-World Origins and Diffusion
The jug form, as defined above, seems to have arisen in the ancient world as a response to technological advances. As practiced in the Near East by 2500 b.c., the fermentation of date and grape juice into wine and the extraction of oil from olives and aromatic and medicinal plants, along with a growing trade in these liquids, required inexpensive containers to store and transport them. At the same time the potter’s wheel, beginning as a low turntable in Mesopotamia and later improved with added flywheel and raised headblock as a kickwheel in Greece and Egypt, offered the speed to support large-scale production and facilitated the continuous drawing in and up of the jug neck.[7] The Far East experienced similar advances, but the loop handle that helps to define the jug never caught on as an addition to the bottle form favored there.
The jug first appeared in Palestine during the second phase of the Early Bronze Age, about 2800 b.c. (fig. 3), then was adopted in Greece (where it was called a lekythos), Egypt, and Persia by 1500 b.c., migrating west, with Phoenician trade, to the Etruscans and Romans.[8] The Roman Empire helped to spread the form beyond the Mediterranean into Germany and Britain, where it became part of the Romano-British ceramic repertoire (fig. 4).[9]
Some German earthenware jugs were indeed made in the Middle Ages, although published references to them are scant.[10] The form came into its own there, however, after the emergence of stoneware in the fourteenth century, perhaps to support the expanding trade in Rhenish wine.[11] German stoneware jugs were most notably manifested as the Bartmannkrug, or graybeard, with a sprig-molded face mask on the neck and medallion on the belly, thousands of which were shipped to Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (figs. 5, 6).[12] Salt-glazed stoneware jug production remained robust in Germany through the nineteenth century, and continues in some areas today (fig. 7).[13]
The jug form’s link to the potter’s wheel is especially evident in the ceramic history of England. When Roman withdrawal and Saxon invasion ushered in the Dark Ages, the wheel fell out of use and shaping technology reverted to hand-building, with open-mouthed forms such as cooking pots and cremation urns dominating as in the prehistoric period.[14] Reintroduction of the wheel in the seventh to twelfth centuries by later Saxons and Normans set the stage for the jug’s revival in the Middle Ages, although the form was less common than the baluster-shaped drinking vessel known to British ceramics historians as a jug.[15] Beer, the chief alcoholic beverage for ordinary medieval folk, was brewed locally and consumed as fresh as possible, hence there was little need to store and transport it. The upper class drank wine, but England’s climate was not conducive to viticulture, and most wine was imported in containers that also were made on the Continent.
Some British earthenware jugs of the Early Modern period were a domestic answer to imported German stoneware, with London delftware potters of the 1620s–1670s producing tin-glazed examples inscribed “sack,” “claret,” and “Renish [sic] wine” as potables became affordable to the growing middle class (fig. 8).[16] Country potters maintained production of lead-glazed jugs through the nineteenth century, along with other coarsewares still needed for storing and processing food and drink (fig. 9).[17] The earliest British stoneware (1640s–1670s)—made by German immigrants and John Dwight in the London area—included Rhenish-style jugs (fig. 10), whereas salt- and later Bristol-glazed stoneware jugs continued to be made in England and Scotland through the nineteenth century, eventually mass-produced in urban factories (fig. 11).[18]
The Jug Comes to America
Documentation for the colonial period, especially the first century of settlement, is too sparse to know what role jugs played in early American life. Again, semantics contribute to the problem, for early written references to jugs would have carried over the English meaning as a wide-mouthed drinking vessel. By the early nineteenth century, however, the American meaning of the word was established (figs. 12, 13).[19]
The foremost Old World influences on Euro-American ceramics were England and Germany, whose immigrant potters transplanted earthenware and stoneware traditions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. England provided precedents for the colonial redware of New England and the Tidewater South, while mid-Atlantic earthenware exhibits a mix of British and German ideas.[20] Influential settlers of these three East Coast regions can be traced to specific areas of Britain, theoretically making it possible to compare early American earthenware jugs with those of key source areas. Thus, for New England one would look to East Anglia, for the mid-Atlantic to northern England and Wales, and for the coastal South to southwest England.[21] Complicating such an approach, however, is the role London played in the settlement of all three American regions, and the difficulty in finding large enough samples of reasonably intact wares from both sides of the Atlantic that were made when influence would have been strongest.
Lura Woodside Watkins, pioneer scholar of New England ceramics, noted that “[j]ugs of redware were . . . not so common in the eighteenth century as in the years that followed.”[22] Surviving American earthenware jugs of the eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries are ovoid or turnip-shaped and often have a narrow foot extending around the base. Decoration normally was limited to incised circumferal lines (tooling) and use of a metallic oxide (copper or manganese) to color the lead glaze. As for regional distinctions, handle placement is typically lower on mid-Atlantic and Southern examples, with the upper end applied to the jug’s shoulder or shoulder-neck juncture, whereas the upper handle terminal on New England examples often was attached to the neck at or near the mouth (fig. 14).[23] This regional handle placement also applies (with exceptions, of course) to American stoneware jugs.
Salt-glazed stoneware technology was introduced to the East Coast in the early eighteenth century from both Germany and England.[24] Many of the oldest surviving American stoneware jugs have a reeded or cordoned (tooled) neck, a feature carried over from German and English stoneware. Those in the Germanic tradition have cobalt blue (or, less common, manganese purple) brushed within an incised design, around handle terminals, and highlighting a stamped maker’s mark (fig. 15); a partial iron-oxide dip created a two-tone effect for those in the English tradition.[25] Both salt- and alkaline-glazed antebellum stoneware jugs made in the South often have a pronounced lip; in the Edgefield District of South Carolina a collar was thrown around the middle of the neck as well (figs. 16, 17, 29).[26] These early neck and lip treatments apparently served both as a design element and as an aid in securing a stopper with a cord or wire.
American ceramics historians have noted a general shift in the shape of stoneware jugs from sensuous to severe that began about 1860.[27] Bulbous and ovoid jugs tended to give way to those with straighter sides (figs. 18-20), culminating in the development of a distinctly American type: the cylindrical “shouldered” or “stacker” jug, with a shoulder ledge to support a production collar so that jugs could be stacked in a column to make efficient use of kiln height.[28] This shift to less curvaceous forms sacrificed graceful proportions for greater volume, making the clay jug more competitive with factory-made glass and metal containers. The change also may reflect a decline in throwing skills as pottery manufacture became more industrialized, although in conservative, family-run shops like those of the rural South, earlier styles sometimes were maintained alongside later ones. Cheever and Lanier Meaders, for example, made both ovoid and cylindrical jugs in the mid- and late twentieth century (figs. 21, 22). Dating estimates for jugs therefore should not be based on shape alone, as each workshop had its own history of form variation.
Permutations: Form Follows Functions
The generic jugs described so far might have been used to contain any liquid, depending on the needs of the owners. Since the form’s origins, however, the emphasis has been on fermented or distilled spirits. In the United States, especially, jugs with the capacity of one quart to two gallons normally were meant for rum or whiskey, sometimes being made to order for distillers (both illicit and licensed). The medieval technology for converting grain to whiskey was brought from Ireland and Scotland in the eighteenth century and adapted to the New World grain, maize, for moonshine and bourbon.[29] As Annie Becham Long, who was born into one middle Georgia “clay clan” and married into another, put it, “Half the people in our part of Crawford County were making jugs and the other half were making liquor to put in ’em.”[30] The form’s importance in the South is underscored by the frequent occupational identification of potters as “jug makers” in the federal censuses, the nickname “Jug” being used by several potters,[31] and the name “Jugtown” identifying at least six pottery-making communities.[32] Southern potters specializing in whiskey jugs (figs. 23, 24) saw their trade decline in the early twentieth century due to Prohibition and the availability of affordable glass and metal containers. Long before that, though, the basic jug had been modified to serve a number of other, more specialized needs.
Building on the Form: Big Jugs, Squatty Jugs, Multi-Neck Jugs
It required no great leap of imagination for American potters to increase jug size to accommodate other uses, just the skill and strength to throw such “bigwares.” A capacity of five gallons was the upper limit of most potters’ normal range, but examples as large as twenty gallons are known.[33] Jugs of four and more gallons often had a second loop handle on the other side of the neck, creating a graceful, amphoralike symmetry while making them easier for two people to lift and carry when full. There are northern English precedents for such large, two-handled jugs (figs. 25, 26), but the form could have arisen independently in response to New World conditions.[34]
One use for big jugs in the United States was as a watercooler or cistern before indoor plumbing, typically with a spigot hole in the lower wall (figs. 27, 28). Decorated examples might also have been used in taverns as beer, wine, or punch dispensers, since nonporous stoneware would have been more sanitary (easier to clean) than wooden kegs.[35] In the antebellum South, sugar, in the form of solid cones, was affordable mainly to the upper class and, as a precious commodity, was locked in an item of furniture known as a sugar chest.[36] Ordinary folk used honey and cane syrup as their chief sweetenings, making syrup jugs of three or more gallons a mainstay of the Southern potter’s repertoire (figs. 17, 29, 30).[37] Kept in the kitchen or nearby smokehouse, the syrup would be handy for cooking or table use. Some potters widened the mouth to facilitate pouring the thick liquid, but this required the owner to fabricate a wooden plug, as the usual corncob stopper would not have made a tight fit.
Another approach to adapting the basic form to specialized uses was to compress it, creating a jug with a low center of gravity. In the late nineteenth century the Norton Pottery of Bennington, Vermont, produced squatty molasses jugs glazed with Albany slip, adding a well-like drip-catcher lip with a pinched pour-spout.[38] Southern potters made even squatter “buggy jugs” (proportionately, the top half or third of a regular jug), which were designed to keep that special stock of “antifreeze” from tipping over on a bumpy buggy or wagon drive (fig. 31).
Localized to northern Georgia and North Carolina’s Catawba Valley, alkaline-glazed “flower jugs” (for displaying cut flowers) elaborated the basic jug form by adding necks (usually four, separately thrown “off the hump”) around the central one.[39] Made as presentation pieces—an inscribed Georgia mountain example has an oral history as a “wedding jug” (fig. 32)—in the mid- to late 1800s and revived by folk potters a century later, they seem related to English and Dutch quintals that were based on a vase type introduced to Europe from Persia along with the tulip in the 1600s. Old World examples, however, lack the loop handle that helps to define a jug.
Further Mutations: Water Jugs for the Field
Two types of “harvest jugs” are known in the United States, each with different Old World roots. Although occasionally made in the North, their concentration in the South can be attributed to the region’s agrarian economy and warm climate; hours of field work in the heat of the day could produce a powerful thirst. Unlike the jug types discussed above, these designs involved major alteration of the basic form.
The ring jug, built from a hollow ring, is a European form that can be traced to ancient Greece[40] but its inspiration in America most likely was the German stoneware tradition (fig. 33).[41] Its wheel-thrown production is something of a potter’s secret: starting with a clay disk, the potter scoops out the center with a rib, leaving a solid ring. A trough is created by pulling up the outer and inner edges, which are then curved toward each other and joined.[42] After cutting the circular tube off the wheel and drying to leather hard, the flat (headblock) side is trimmed to the round and a separately thrown neck is attached over a hole cut in the arch. It is at this stage that the potter has the option of creating a jug or a bottle; if the former, one or two loop handles, and a thrown or solid-block base, are added (fig. 34).
A functional explanation for the donut shape is that it could lie flat for easier transport. The center hole allowed placement on a saddle horn, the hame knob of a plow-animal’s collar, or a tree branch; in some cases this opening was large enough for the insertion of an arm, for carrying on the shoulder. Twentieth-century Southern ring jugs and bottles were made as novelties. Georgia-born Javan Brown glazed his “old-time” ring jugs on one side only (that side faced out so that the sun reflected off the shiny glaze, while the porosity of the unglazed side allowed limited evaporation of the water, to keep it cool). Marie Rogers of Jugtown, Georgia, calls them “Confederate jugs,” having heard from her husband, Horace (from whom she learned to make them), and his father, Rufus, that they sometimes were used as canteens by Rebel soldiers in the Civil War.[43] Bill Gordy of Cartersville, Georgia, added a mushroom-shaped stopper to his ring jugs, which he coated with his signature “Mountain Gold” glaze.[44]
The “monkey” (an Afro-Caribbean term for thirst) jug is distinguished by a stirrup handle across the top and a tubular, canted (off-center and angled) spout. A second neck (which could have a widened mouth for filling) or airhole would cause the water to stream into the drinker’s mouth (fig. 35). The separately thrown necks are located either below the handle terminals in the plane of the handle or on opposite sides of it. This form, also traceable to ancient Greece, is concentrated in Africa and Mediterranean Europe (figs. 36, 37); in Spain, where it is known as a botijo, it is virtually a national emblem, with three museums devoted to its seemingly infinite variety in shape, glaze, and ornamentation.[45] In America, imports from Europe may have inspired Northern monkey jugs; in the South, where the form was made by slave potters, a West African source is probable.[46]
Craft into Art: Making Faces on Jugs
Working in such a malleable medium day in and day out, it is not surprising that potters the world over have seen their clay as a kind of mirror and accepted its challenge to model a human likeness on a pot, pushing utilitarian craft into plastic art. This anthropomorphizing impulse is stronger in some clay-working societies than in others; in England, for example, it surfaced several times, first with Romano-British burial urns, then with medieval “face-on-front jugs,” and finally with the “Toby jugs” of late-eighteenth-century Staffordshire, which initiated an industrial tradition of slip-cast character mugs continuing to this day.[47] Evidently, however, England was not the source of America’s face-jug traditions.
In reviewing what is known of those traditions, three points should be made by way of introduction. First, although many humanoid vessels made in the United States are indeed jugs, some are pitchers, cups, jars, or bottles. Second, not all depict just faces or heads; some are full figures. Third, Native Americans of the South made “people pots” during the Mississippian era (a.d. 800–1540), too early to have influenced the Southern face jugs discussed here.[48]
As with other adaptations of the jug form in the United States, face vessels—as both a historical and a living tradition—have been concentrated in the South. However, the oldest known Euro-American examples are from the early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia workshop of Henry Remmey Jr. (fig. 38), whose great-grandfather, stoneware potter John Remmey, had immigrated to Manhattan from the Rhineland in the 1730s. John would have been familiar with the graybeard jugs still being made in Germany, and if he made them in New York and passed the concept to his descendants, then Henry’s face vessels are Americanizations of the German tradition.[49]
A substantial group of early Southern face vessels was made between 1863 and 1865 by enslaved African-American potters at Colonel Thomas Davies’s Palmetto Fire Brick Works at Bath, in the old Edgefield District of west-central South Carolina.[50] Distinguished by bulging eyes and bared teeth of kaolin inset into the stoneware clay body, the iron-based mineral that darkened the alkaline glaze on some, along with the wax resist used to keep the glaze off the white eyes and teeth to maximize contrast, leave little doubt that they were meant to represent their makers’ race (figs. 39, 40). Pioneer ceramics historian Edwin AtLee Barber, after corresponding with Davies, was the first to discuss them in print: “These curious objects . . . possess considerable interest as representing an art of the Southern negroes. . . . The modeling reveals a trace of aboriginal art as formerly practiced by their ancestors in the Dark Continent.”[51] Barber says nothing, however, of the makers’ motivations. Sixty years later, Yale University art historian Robert Farris Thompson advanced Barber’s suggestion of African origins, arguing that later white face-jug makers such as Cheever Meaders appropriated the “Afro-Carolinian” tradition.[52]
Germany and Africa, then, are two possible sources for American face jugs, with a third possibility that they arose independent of any Old World influence. Can we come any closer to resolving this historical dilemma? Anthropomorphic clay vessels were indeed made in West Africa (the chief source area of the Atlantic slave trade), perhaps early enough for the idea to be brought by slaves. The Yungur of Nigeria, for example, made portrait pots called wiiso to honor ancestral spirits at shrines,[53] and the Mambila of Cameroon made similar figural vessels (fig. 41). The angry expressions of some Afro-Carolinian face vessels, which could be interpreted as a nonverbal protest against enslavement, and a few tantalizing hints that these vessels may have been used in magico-religious or mortuary practices, at least suggest that they had a meaning distinct from face jugs by white potters. This raises the question whether white potters in the South made face vessels as early as the slave-made ones.
In 1995 a piece in a private collection surfaced that addresses this question (fig. 42). An alkaline-glazed, happy-faced jug with the monkey form, it is stamped “CHANDLER / MAKER,” the mark of Thomas Chandler, a white potter who worked in Edgefield District from 1838 to 1852.[54] Made about 1850, it preceded the slave-made face vessels from the Davies workshop by over a decade. Before moving to South Carolina, Virginia-born Chandler may have worked as a potter in New York State; it is remotely possible that in his Northern sojourn he met and learned of face vessels from one of the Remmeys.[55] Did Chandler then introduce the concept to Edgefield slave potters, or were they working in a separate, perhaps African-based, tradition? We now know that the face jugs of Cheever and Lanier Meaders were part of a continuous Anglo-Southern tradition, but whether ultimately inspired by slave-made examples, as Thompson suggests, might never be learned (fig. 43).
The Jug Today
Jugs are still indispensable for keeping liquids, from bleach to milk and larger volumes of wine. Now, though, they rarely are made of clay; glass and plastic containers are less expensive to produce, and the latter has the further advantage of being less breakable (fig. 44). In recent years, a few whiskey companies have used mold-made clay jugs to reinforce the old-fashioned image of their product, and school-trained studio potters may occasionally throw a jug to demonstrate that they are not embarrassed to make a useful form despite the current trend of pottery as Art.[56]
In the 1980s and 1990s it seemed as though every potter in the South, folk and otherwise, was trying his or her hand at face jugs, which had become something of a regional art icon (for which Lanier Meaders deserves much of the credit).[57] Today, however, the handcrafting of jugs, with or without faces, is largely the prerogative of a small number of traditionally trained potters, and the domain of a form that once dominated utilitarian American ceramics has shrunk to rural North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama (figs. 45-47). The market has become one of collectors and home decorators, and the everyday uses of these fluid vessels have all but dried up.
