Keystone Pottery

Charles F. Decker learned salt glazing from a father and grandfather who were potters in Germany. Salt glazing was hard on a kiln, which frequently needed rebuilding. Surviving pieces carry his signature and dates from the 1880s and 1890s, and he won premiums at the East Tennessee fairs in Knoxville in 1879 and 1880. The shop's output ranged from jugs, crocks and churn pots to flower pots, spittoons, drain pipes and rolling pins, along with grave markers, face jugs and a ceramic horn.

What the plaque says

Keystone Pottery Eighty yards south. German immigrant Charles F. Decker opened the Keystone Pottery in 1872. Kitchen and household ware were produced in large quantities. The Decker family also crafted a variety of unique and beautifully decorated grave markers, chamber pots, chicken fountains, inkwells, and face jugs. Pottery laden wagons rolled to many points in Tennessee and surrounding states. This was a significant industry in Chucky valley for more than 30 years.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Unicoi County Heritage Museum and the Erwin Rail Yard — 5.6 mi
  A museum in the old fish hatchery superintendent's house in Erwin, a Clinchfield railroad town where the elephant Mary was hanged in 1916 and Black residents were driven out in 1918.
• Jonesborough Historic District — 7.0 mi
  Tennessee's oldest town, chartered in 1779, where Elihu Embree printed The Emancipator in 1820 and a hay wagon by the courthouse started the National Storytelling Festival in 1973.
• Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park — 16 mi
  A shoal on the Watauga River where the Transylvania Company bought about 20 million acres from the Cherokee in March 1775, Dragging Canoe refused, and the Overmountain Men mustered in 1780.
• Rocky Mount Museum — 17 mi
  William Cobb's log house at Piney Flats, where Governor William Blount ran the Southwest Territory from 1790 to 1792, now a living-history museum set in 1791 with a reconstructed cabin for the enslaved.

More markers nearby

• Jacob Brown — 1.0 mi
• Blue Ridge Pottery — 5.1 mi
• Unicoi County / Town of Erwin — 5.1 mi
• Battle of Red Banks — 5.4 mi