Dave the Potter

Dave the Potter (born c. 1800, probably United States—died 1870s, Edgefield, South Carolina?) was an American potter and poet who, while enslaved in South Carolina, produced enormous stoneware pots. He signed many of them with his first name and inscribed a few with original poetic verses.

Early life

Definitive information about Dave’s life is scarce. In 1919 a pot bearing his name and an inscription was donated to the Charleston Museum in South Carolina. The donation triggered research into the potter’s identity. Since then, much of his biography has been reconstructed from the family and business records of his enslavers and from his poetry. Though nothing is known of Dave’s parents, he was likely born into slavery in the United States in the early 19th century. His first enslaver was probably a man named Harvey Drake. Drake was the nephew and business partner of the scientific farmer, doctor, and entrepreneur Abner Landrum, who was also the founder of Pottersville, South Carolina, one of several potteries near the town of Edgefield. During the 19th century, the potteries of the Edgefield area—and those near plantation sites throughout many Southern states—were owned and operated by white men, but the pots themselves were produced mostly by enslaved African Americans. According to a mortgage document of Drake’s, Dave was about 17 years old when he started working in the pottery facility owned and operated by Landrum. There he learned to craft pots mostly for agrarian use by the surrounding plantations..

Signature and inscriptions

Dave began signing his pots in 1840, but his inscriptions appear earlier. Before he glazed and fired the pots, he often incised the clay with rhyming couplets, such as “put every bit all between / surely this jar will hold 14” (on a pot dated 1834). Sometimes the verses were more autobiographical, such as “Dave belongs to Mr Miles / wher the oven bakes & the pot biles” (on a pot dated July 31, 1840), which presumably referred to his having been recently sold to Lewis Miles. At that point many of his pots also began to include the initials “LM.” It is unclear how Dave learned to read and write, especially considering that teaching an enslaved person to do so in South Carolina was illegal.

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Perhaps for this reason, Dave did not sign, date, and inscribe his pots consistently throughout his life. Some pots are signed but not inscribed, while others are not signed or inscribed at all. These omissions may indicate that during that particular time it was unsafe for him to do so. It is commonly held that the 17-year period when Dave did not inscribe any pots with poetry, beginning in late 1840, may have been in response to the tense atmosphere leading up to an 1841 slave uprising in Augusta, Georgia. After that event it would have been dangerous for him to broadcast his literacy on his work. Most pots that he made during that era were unmarked, but a few were signed and dated.

Later life

Dave’s pots are notable not only for their inscriptions—and what those marks say about the character of the potter himself—but also for their mammoth size, some big enough to hold some 40 gallons (151 liters) of liquid. They are among the largest pots to have been made by hand in the United States. The last extant pot attributed to Dave was dated 1864, meaning he worked as a potter or as a turner (the person who makes the potter’s wheel revolve) for three full decades, during which he produced more than 100 signed and dated vessels and may have made tens of thousands more that left unsigned. It is thought that Dave was enslaved by four or five different individuals before the Civil War and emancipation, at which point he took the surname of his probable first enslaver, Harvey Drake, who had died in 1832. He was listed as “David Drake, occupation: turner,” in the 1870 census. His name, however, does not appear in the 1880 census, and historians believe he died sometime in between.

Legacy

Because of the story that has emerged about Dave, his pots have become the most valuable and important pieces of Edgefield pottery. Since the first 20th-century discovery of a pot bearing his name, archaeological digs in the old Edgefield District have unearthed material—shards and kilns—that have shed light on Dave and other enslaved potters and their role in the pottery industry of that region.