Book-length life histories of traditional visual artists from the American South are few and far between. Two such studies are of a Kentucky mountain chair-maker and a Georgia-Alabama quilter, the former alive when the initial fieldwork was conducted, the latter a historical figure whose story the author, granddaughter of the subject, reconstructed through family history and surviving handiwork examples.[1] More recent publications feature a North Carolina potter—still very much alive—and an antebellum South Carolina potter.[2] We can add to this scant list Scott Suter’s story of his great-great grandfather, a nineteenth-century potter of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Beyond the family connection, the author is well qualified to tackle that task, having been trained by John Vlach at George Washington University and Charles G. (Terry) Zug at the University of North Carolina, both great scholars of American material folk culture whose research embraces both living and historical traditions.
Emanuel Suter may have been a Virginian, but to refer to him as a southerner would be problematic. His mindset and ceramic tradition were essentially northern, more specifically Mid-Atlantic. Emanuel was born in 1833 to a Swiss immigrant father and Pennsylvania German mother in Virginia’s Rockingham County, where he would spend his life as a potter and farmer. He learned the potter’s craft from his older cousin, John D. Heatwole, and from Heatwole’s father-in-law, Andrew Coffman, who in turn had learned from Jacob and Christian Adam in New Market, Virginia. This training involved the making of earthenware (both lead-glazed and unglazed, the oldest tradition) and the somewhat later salt-glazed stoneware.
As a traditional potter Suter was unexceptional, in comparison, say, to contemporaries such as Baltimore’s Henry Remmey and William H. Morgan, known for their fine cobalt-blue decoration, or Edgefield District, South Carolina’s David Drake, the enslaved African American potter who made enormous jars and “decorated” them with his own poetry. He was certainly skilled at the potter’s wheel, but his cobalt decoration, when he used it, was fairly basic. Simply put, Suter was a utilitarian potter, emphasizing throughout his career useful wares needed by his region’s farming folk. In that respect, he was typical of most folk potters of his day. So why does he merit a book-length treatment? First, because he was typical; most publications in the field of decorative arts emphasize just that, decorative artistry, ignoring or downplaying the bulk of material folk culture created by craftspeople in the United States.
But just as important, as the book’s title suggests, is that Emanuel Suter was in fact atypical in this respect: in comparison to his more conservative potter neighbors, he was a progressive thinker who embraced change in his craft as the industrial revolution kicked into high gear during the second half of the nineteenth century. This progressive mindset applied to other aspects of his life as well: his farming technology (buying a mechanical reaper and thresher, then becoming a manufacturers’ representative to sell them to neighbors), his religious beliefs (pushing for liberal changes in his Mennonite Church), and his domestic space (remodeling his family’s log house to make it more up-to-date). Suter read the handwriting on the wall: in order for potters to continue making a decent living at their craft, serious rethinking was in order. The trigger for this rethinking occurred in 1865 when, after moving his family to Pennsylvania to escape the Civil War’s disruptions in the Shenandoah Valley, he went to work at the Cowden and Wilcox pottery in Harrisburg, more a factory than a workshop, with many workers and a degree of mechanization. Suter was impressed by what he experienced there and brought some new ideas back to Virginia on his return later that year, putting them to work at his pottery on the farm called New Erection. These included year-round, rather than just seasonal, production and adoption of labor-saving technology, including a steam engine, drain-tile press, and “glazing pump.” The author, using family and archival records (including the potter’s diary), documents his ancestor’s increasing role as a businessman as he exploited the rail system to seek new markets in the valley and beyond.
Students in my America’s folk crafts course are surprised to learn that many traditional arts have been practiced not just for aesthetic satisfaction but as a source of part- or full-time income.[3] To be a successful artist, folk or otherwise, it helps to have a good business sense, and it was so in the nineteenth century just as it is today. Suter visited pottery factories throughout the East and Midwest to learn how to operate more efficiently and economically.
The final stage in Suter’s career may come as a shock: his shift from folk craftsman to entrepreneur. In 1890 he founded, at the Rockingham County seat, the Harrisonburg Steam Pottery Company, a joint stock venture of which he was president. Like the semi-industrial operations he’d seen, it was more factory than workshop, with a hired team of workers, imported rather than local clay, a large down-draft kiln built by an Englishman from New Jersey, and a “jigger wheel” for molding flowerpots and such. Some household wares such as jugs and jars were still “turned” (hand-thrown) on the potter’s wheel, but as the author says, “The extant examples . . . often lack the graceful form of Suter’s New Erection work, suggesting that other, less skilled turners were making many of these pieces” (94). In 1897 Suter sold his shares of what by all accounts was a successful business. The author calls the potter’s “sudden exit . . . perplexing” (99)—but maybe not. After a hard life as a craftsman and farmer, Suter’s decision to retire at age sixty-four and leave his brainchild in the hands of his sons (until it closed a few years later) doesn’t surprise me.
So what lessons do Scott Suter’s book have for those of us who study traditional crafts? In his epilogue he states, “Suter’s efforts to modernize pottery production in his region represent the most reasonable choice a potter could make if he wanted to continue in the business” (104). But in Suter’s day, was it the only choice? Let’s take a page from another craft: blacksmithing. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were thousands of blacksmiths in the United States, many of them forging iron horseshoes and wagon parts. The availability of automobiles changed all that. Many simply left the craft; others shifted to ornamental ironwork, or opened garages. Those few who persisted in their old, small way would later benefit, as did surviving folk potters of the Southeast like Cheever Meaders of Georgia and Burlon Craig of North Carolina, from the handcraft revival that blossomed in the 1930s to create an appreciative collector market (in the Southwest, a market for Pueblo Indian pottery arose earlier with the coming of the railroads). Would Emanuel Suter have maintained his old Shenandoah Valley pottery tradition if such a revival had occurred in his day? I doubt it. We learn from this slim but excellent book by his great-great grandson that he was committed to his vision of progress, no matter what. Emanuel Suter chose a radical path for his craft.
[1] Michael Owen Jones, Craftsman of the Cumberlands: Tradition and Creativity (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989); Nancilu B. Burdick, Legacy: The Story of Talula Gilbert Bottoms and Her Quilts (Nashville, TN: Rutledge Hill, 1988).
[2] Henry Glassie, Daniel Johnston: A Portrait of the Artist as a Potter in North Carolina (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020); Leonard Todd, Carolina Clay: The Life and Legend of the Slave Potter Dave (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).
[3] Willow G. Mullins and Puja Batra-Wells, eds., The Folklorist in the Marketplace: Conversations at the Crossroads of Vernacular Culture and Economics (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2019).
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[Review length: 1286 words • Review posted on August 20, 2020]