Dec 3, 2025 — Continuing
South Carolina's Old Edgefield District encompassed a region that today includes parts or all of Aiken, Edgefield, Greenwood, McCormick and Saluda Counties. It was there around 1820 that Dr. Abner Landrum (1785-1859), a resident physician, newspaper publisher and entrepreneurial businessman, pioneered the manufacture of alkaline-glazed utilitarian stoneware when he opened the area's first commercial pottery factory in the village of Pottersville (about a mile north of Edgefield Court House). Other potteries followed nearby, most owned and operated by Landrum family members, producing storage and domestic wares ideal for holding liquids, pickling vegetables and preserving meats, and in household forms that included crocks, jugs, pitchers, cups and bowls. Dr. Landrum's Pottersville Stoneware Manufactory survived for about three decades, changing hands among at least twelve different investors/owners who operated it into the 1850s.
The pottery-making industry in Edgefield was dependent on enslaved labor, which was needed for digging and transporting clay, preparing it for building and turning vessels, cutting firewood, filling, stoking and emptying kins and moving the product to regional markets. Only a handful of names of these artisans remain in the public record.
Fifty years ago, in 1975, the Greenville County Museum of Art began organizing the first museum exhibition focused on the alkaline glazed pottery of mid-nineteenth-century Edgefield District. Based on the research and collecting of local potter Stephen Ferrell and his father Reverend Terry Ferrell, the show opened the following year and traveled to sister museums in Charleston and Columbia.
In recent years, thanks to the generosity of many donors, this museum has become home to one of the most important collections of historic Edgefield pottery. We are grateful to the donors and lenders who have made this installation possible, as well as to our Consulting Curator Phil Wingard for his knowledge and guidance.