"Pauline, which
one do you want me to do? D'you want me to build a pottery shop
or build a tobacco barn, and she said, whatever you want to do,
it don't make no difference to me, whatever you want to do."
(Neolia Cole recounting
what her father asked his young wife shortly after they had
gotten married.)
And so with his wife's blessing A.R. Cole became a potter.
Although he didn't tell Pauline there and then. She found out a
few months later when the building he was working on began to
take shape and she noted that the rafters, situated as they
were, made it too short to be a tobacco barn. She should have
known all along, and maybe she did. The Cole family had been
turning pots for three hundred years, dating back to 17th
century England. A.R. Cole didn't want to do anything else but
be a potter.
"They built their own
kiln, made their own brick ... and he brought out his first kiln
of pottery on the first day of December, 1927, and that's the
mornin' I was born."
Neolia Cole
By the mid twenties the Coles were making
a family as well as making pottery. Pauline took care of the
shop's books and the seven children while A.R. turned out
pottery. Once he had turned and fired a truckload of pottery A.R.
would travel the fifty miles or so to Sanford, North Carolina,
where he sold it to a distributer. He liked the location of
Sanford. It was on the number one highway, the main highway from
Maine to Florida at the time. It was also central to the
universities of Raleigh and Chapel Hill and the military base at
Fort Bragg. The location couldn't be much better for a potter to
sell his wares. Instead of driving fifty miles to the customer
A.R. decided to have the customer come to him. So, in 1934 he
left Seagrove for Sanford again. But this time instead of
pottery he had his family. The Coles were moving on just as
their ancestors had done years ago when they left the villages
around Staffordshire, England to make a new life.
"I don't care how bad you
feel, hurtin', mad, upset, worried; you get down here and get in
this clay, and you start makin' pottery. You'll forget everythin'
you was mad about.
Celia Cole
Celia and Neolia Cole have been making
pottery for over sixty-five years. They learned from their
father at a young age how to turn and mix glaze. It wasn't easy
learning. They both cried, and maybe A.R. did too, inside a
little, when he broke what they had turned and told them to
start over. Neolia, on several occasions, vowed never to return
to the shop. Celia, with "that old Cole temper" broke her own
pots before her father would do it for her. But they were
learning all the time and if he had broke a thousand pots that
they had turned (and maybe he did!)it would never dull their
affection for their father - "I miss him," says Celia, "I still
miss him."
Today, Neolia's grandson, Kenneth is carrying on the Cole
tradition. He has been making pottery for over twelve years
having learned from Neolia and Celia. And as Neolia says "He's
been a blessing since he come here." Kenneth has taken over the
heavy work of grinding clay in his great granddad's old pug
mill, "The process hasn't changed, only thing that's changed is
the operator," he says. I guess that's always been the way.
