Wilson Potteries

The ware made here belongs to a tradition carried west from the Edgefield District of South Carolina: alkaline glazes, ovoid jars sometimes trailed with slip, and long "groundhog" kilns. Rev. Wilson was not a potter, and the first pottery's work was probably done by the men he enslaved. Between 1860 and 1866 Marion J. Durham, a white potter from Edgefield, and a Black potter, John Chandler, came to the site. Salt-glazed sherds in its waste pile suggest a potter trained farther north, and its chamber pots, churns, bowls, pitchers and storage jars met the needs of an isolated frontier.

What the plaque says

Wilson Potteries Presbyterian minister John M. Wilson came to this area in 1856 with his family and slaves. Since earthen vessels were major 19th-century food storage items, Wilson established a pottery kiln in this vicinity in 1860. After Wilson sold his interest in the business in 1869, 3 of his former slaves began their own pottery shop. James, Hiram, and Wallace Wilson, who operated H. Wilson & Co. until 1884, created their own style of pottery and ran a successful business during the Reconstruction Era, when many newly-freed slaves found work only as sharecroppers. (1985)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 22 mi
  The hilltop where Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels raised the Adelsverein's headquarters in 1845, now the museum and archive of the German colony that became New Braunfels.
• Gruene Historic District — 23 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.
• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 26 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.

More markers nearby

• El Capote Ranch — 3.6 mi
• Battleground Prairie — 5.7 mi
• William B. Fleming — 6.8 mi
• Henry Eustace McCulloch — 8.3 mi