The idea that became Blue Ridge Pottery probably started about seventy years ago. As a small child I grasped my mother’s hand and walked across a boggy Welsh pasture to the farm below where we watched farmer Hugh Morgan dip milk from a large frothy tank. He used a brown and worn pottery pitcher and dipped milk into the larger brown jug my mother had carried across the fields.

 

Pottery was just a part of life in 1940’s Wales; we drank from it, cooked in it and used it to carry our milk home to a tiny cottage in the Welsh Mountains. It was pottery of simple and useful shapes. It was usually brown, and perhaps in concert with the basic “gospel” values of the Welsh Valleys people it was “functional without adornment”.

 

Over the many years we have been in this location on Golden Horseshoe Road many things have changed. Children have grown up to have children and grandchildren of their own and have come back to help in the family business. We have grown to include much loved son-in-laws and adopted daughters. It is no longer one person but a committed group of artists making a living together and believing in their amazing combined talents. In 1998 we incorporated as Blue Ridge Pottery, Inc. and later enlarged the family ownership of the business.

 

This is a personal “Thank You” to all those who have supported us and have worked with us over the years and made this “Pottery in the Mountains” dream come true. Remember that Welsh boy that loves the mountains and likes to play in the clay or down at the stream. He’s still around. He may occasionally be sitting at the wheel making pots but look for him in the garden. He’s the one that’s all dirty, with one or two grand-daughters at his side, planting flowers and playing in the dirt.