Burlon Craig

As a teenager, Burlon Craig apprenticed to a local potter in North Carolina, gathering clay and turning objects on the wheel (Chuck and Jan Rosenak, Museum of American Folk Art Encyclopedia, 1990). He worked in a furniture factory for almost twenty years, but continued to make pottery in the evenings. Craig helped revive the Catawba pottery tradition, developed by German immigrants in the eighteenth century, which used wood-fired kilns and alkaline glazes made from local materials ("Burlon Craig," William Oppenheimer, Folk Art Messenger, 2002). He ran his pottery in Vale, North Carolina, and is honored there with an annual festival called Burlon Craig Day.