A white-bearded man bends over a potter’s wheel in a log workshop with a dirt floor. His hands alternately caress and coerce lumps of clay spinning in the center of the wheel, fingers pressing this way and pulling that way. Within minutes, each new shape emerges: a bowl, perhaps, or a pitcher, or a vase with graceful curves.

The man, Vernon Owens, makes these transformations look simple. But he grins when asked if, after more than 50 years at the wheel, he has perfected his technique.

“I never have been able to master the thing,” says Owens, a potter who lives and works in the Seagrove area of central North Carolina, located about 40 miles south of Greensboro. “Some days it goes real good and I’ll be pleased with what I made. Some days I’ll be fighting with it.”

As a boy he watched his father, M.L. Owens, at work. When the elder Owens took a break, young Vernon would try to mimic his dad. Today, electricity turns the wheel instead of the potter’s own foot power. “I remember kicking that wheel and jumping up on something and working ’til it stopped,” he says. “By the time I was 10, I was making pots for him to sell. Once I got good enough to do it, I had to do it because Daddy expected it. I was making pots a lot of days when I’d rather have been playing.”

Vernon was 15 when he started making pottery for potter C.C. Cole. Four years later, in 1960, he was offered a job at Jugtown Pottery, a working pottery and craft shop established in 1917. “It was as hard or harder to get a job then as it is now,” Owens says. “Of course I wasn’t looking for anything else.” He never left and eventually bought the Jugtown operation in 1983.

Vernon’s grandfather as well as earlier ancestors were potters, too; his son, Travis, represents the fifth generation of potters on this branch of the Owens family tree. Such tradition is not unusual in the heart of the Tar Heel State, where locals have been making utilitarian wares for centuries.

“That’s the remarkable thing about this area, the continuous line of potters who have drawn from their past and their ancestors but continue to innovate,” says Vernon’s wife, Pam, who also turns pots at Jugtown. “Seagrove [area] pottery is not just a statewide treasure. It’s a national treasure. It’s sort of a phenomenal thing to have this concentration of potters.”

In 2005, state lawmakers voted to recognize the Seagrove area—defined as parts of Randolph, Moore, Montgomery and Chatham counties—as “the birthplace of North Carolina traditional pottery.” State Highway 705, a two-lane strip through Randolph and Moore, has been officially designated “Pottery Highway.” A roadside marker reads: “POTTERY INDUSTRY. Begun in 18th century by Chriscoe, Cole, Craven, Luck, McNeill, Owen & Teague families living within 5 mile radius.”

“We do not know exactly when the first piece was made, but it was around 250 years ago,” says Phil Morgan of Phil Morgan Pottery near Seagrove. Historians speculate that the early potters were descendants of English farmers who found the clay-rich soil in their fields ideal for making utilitarian wares—plates, jugs, crocks and such—both to use and sell to supplement their income. Before and after the Civil War, the area had dozens of pottery shops. During the war some potters were exempt from military service so they could supply the army with cups and bowls for soldiers.

Glass containers would eventually replace those made of earthenware, and by the early 20th century, pottery making had nearly died out in the region. A renaissance began after Juliana Busbee, the wife of a Raleigh-born portrait painter, spotted an orange pie plate made by a country potter at a fair near Lexington, North Carolina. She and her husband, Jacques, founded Jugtown to try and save the art of pottery making. Jacques brought Chinese design to the traditional pottery forms long produced in the area. He hired local potters to make the wares, which soon were the rage among buyers as far away as New York, France and England.

By the 1950s, the spark of creativity reignited by the Busbees had waned again. And while pottery making was not dead, as recently as the early 1970s just six potteries operated in the Seagrove area. The number would continue to grow, fueled largely by graduates of a production pottery program at nearby Montgomery Community College, and by 1992 there were nearly four dozen. Roughly 100 are in operation today.

“Seagrove is what I refer to as the pottery mecca of the United States,” says Jeff Brown of Michele Hastings & Jeff Brown Pottery. The North Carolina native first visited the Seagrove area in the 1970s on an art field trip during high school. Pottery- making captured his attention, and he bought a wheel.

“As soon as I opened the first bag of clay,” he says, “that earth smell, the aroma, I was hooked. And I just liked the way the clay felt in [my] hand. You can form it into anything.”

Brown worked for a number of potters around Seagrove, and after moving to New Hampshire spent 10 years at a production pottery factory before opening his own studio, making pots and teaching pottery making. He and Hastings, a former student, moved their business to Seagrove and opened last summer.

“The beauty of Seagrove,” says Brown, “is that there are as many pottery shops [here] as there are in [all of] New Hampshire. It’s a supportive community, a pottery haven with great creative diversity.” The beauty of Seagrove for pottery lovers, he says, is its diversity. No two potters—or their wares—are alike. Three good examples:

Brown himself, who describes his work as functional, wheel-thrown, altered and textured stoneware and porcelain with geometric designs impressed and carved into the soft clay; Morgan, who makes utilitarian cookware but is best known for stunning crystalline glazed porcelain; and the potters of Jugtown, who make wood- and gas-fired pieces—traditional jugs and candlesticks in salt glaze and frogskin (mustard green); tableware in green, blue, brown and gray; and vases, bowls and jars in glazes made with wood ash, local clays, copper reds, greens and iron earth tones.

Along the main roads and back roads of the Seagrove area, there are potters whose families have been making pots for generations and beginning potters who just graduated from college. There are potters who produce simple pieces designed for everyday use, those who create decorative works of fine art, and those who make folk art, such as face jugs. Others make huge pots or works in miniature. Some pieces are made on the wheel and some not.

“Everybody’s hand touches clay a different way,” Brown says, “and their hands are going to feel the clay a different way. A good way to say it is that Seagrove is steeped in tradition with a flair for the contemporary.”

“There’s no other place in the country where you can see the work of 100 potters and meet the potters,” says Morgan. “And when you go to the individual potteries in the Seagrove area, you’re going to see the pieces made. You’re going to find real pottery made by real potters. It’s not mass-produced by machinery.

“And the potters love your visit,” Morgan continues. “They love to see you. They want to see how you react to their work. They keep their doors open at least five days a week, hoping you will come see what they do. If I get behind [because of visitors], I can catch up at night. I live right next door.”

Morgan equates visiting area potteries to “a little treasure hunt down through the community,” with surprises behind every shop door. “When you come to Seagrove and you don’t find a piece of pottery you like,” he adds, “you never liked pottery to begin with.”