Unearthed: Discover the Tradition of Seagrove Pottery 🏺

Halfway between Charlotte and Raleigh you’ll find an esteemed community of artists who carry on a pottery tradition that dates to the 1700s

Photo courtesy of Ben Owen III

By Jenna Biter

Halfway between Charlotte and Raleigh, N.C. 705 winds its way through the Piedmont in the shadow of the Uwharrie Mountains. The two-lane road—what seems a highway in name only—wanders past farms and longleaf pines to connect the small towns that are home to an esteemed community of artists who carry on a pottery tradition that dates to the 1700s.

Brown metal tourist signs mark the roughly 30-mile road by its popular name, the North Carolina Pottery Highway, home of the Seagrove area potters. Turn down any gravel drive, and you’ll find a pottery shop with a kiln under an awning out back, or some sort of similar setup. A hundred or so Seagrove potters make their living in such workshops, shaping clay into vessels beloved by craft enthusiasts the world over.

Matthew Kelly is one of these potters. He works out of his eponymous pottery beside his Asheboro home, a stone’s throw from Seagrove, usually with his Dachshund, Maisey, yapping happily at his feet. Kelly, a first-generation potter, opened the shop in 2019, although his professional career in clay began decades before at a nearby pottery when he was only 16 years old. “I’ve probably made somewhere around 700,000 pots in those thirty years,” Kelly says.

Photo of Matthew Kelly at left; both photos courtesy of Kelly

Past a display of earth-toned mugs, birdhouses, and decorative jugs carved with goofy faces and names like Grover, there’s a wall map stuck with colorful ball-point pins. Most of the pins mark the destinations of wares he’s shipped, but the red pins mark the hometowns of people who’ve visited Kelly’s shop from far away. One red pin sticks out from the middle of Alaska.

Most of the far-flung travelers discovered Kelly’s work through his YouTube channel, where he has almost 37,000 subscribers. He regularly uploads videos of himself throwing pots on the wheel and unloading his kiln after a firing. “I’m known in Seagrove as the ‘YouTube Guy,’” Kelly says, with a laugh.

Less than a 10-minute drive from Kelly’s pottery is one of the Seagrove area’s best-known studios, Ben Owen Pottery. Ben Owen III’s vases and dinnerware decorate the dining room at Herons, the Forbes five-star restaurant in the Umstead Hotel and Spa in Cary, North Carolina. Owen’s works can be admired around the globe, as far from the rural Carolinas as the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Tokyo, Japan.

Photo of Ben Owen III courtesy of Owen