Local stoneware clay is a link with the past

Mom, her friend - Ella Victoria Dobbs - and I were off to the woods one spring day, and Miss Dobbs stopped when she saw some white earth in the bank of a small stream. She clawed out some of the moist material and "went ape" over it. "This is almost like porcelain," she said and kept a sample.

Photo courtesy of Sue Gerard photo Sue digs into a mound of white Cheltenham clay that was exposed by road work on Route WW during the 1960s. I was just a kid - perhaps 8 or 9 - but this white stuff was fun to hold and to smooth into something thin or round like a ball.

Miss Dobbs took her sample to the University of Missouri-Columbia art department - where she taught - and dried it, fired it in a pottery kiln and called to tell Mom that it withstood a lot of heat and didn’t warp or break. That didn’t seem important to me! I had a mule to ride, fish and frogs to catch and daily chores to do on our dairy farm. I was also begging for a bicycle. Miss Dobbs’ discovery was important to her, and I didn’t forget that "clay is a link with the past!"

When my husband, Chub Gerard, was in the military during World War II, we bought 27 "worthless" acres from my Dad and later built a home there.

When East Broadway became Route WW, the highway department took more than half an acre of our land and widened the right of way. Their machines opened up a wonderful bank of the same clay that Miss Dobbs had tested at the university’s art department so many years before. She passed away, and I knew no one who had dug clay.

I made some crude figurines with what I considered to be "my clay" because the state had paid us nothing for the land.

All I knew about clay was this: If it is thoroughly dry - all the way through - it will take in water and can be shaped endlessly. I made silly things, dried them, crushed them and moistened the same clay to use again and again. I wanted to share that experience with my Christian College class in recreational leadership. I shared Miss Dobbs’ revolutionary idea for elementary school art classes: to encourage children to be individually creative with a wide variety of materials, as opposed to teaching specifics for all to follow.

I needed more information about how to use the local clay that those bulldozers had exposed in my yard!

In libraries and book stores I found no directions for preparing local pottery clay. Finally I found a large expensive book that had a half page about using local clay, and I memorized it.

It was approximately this: "Dig, dry and crush clay; dissolve in lots of water; strain through small mesh sieves; siphon off water and dry it until it can be handled without sticking to hands. Shape an object and dry it thoroughly. Fire in a kiln to make it hard as a rock."

I learned a lot by trial and error, too. In the 1950s the Christian College bus took my students and me to that big hillside of clay; each of the 25 students dug her own small bag full. I told them to make something. Their "things" were as diverse as the students themselves! There were turtles, frogs, pin trays, mugs, frat symbols - all with obvious student ingenuity. The dean of women, Elizabeth Kirkman, said, "Sue, I see you’ve been digging clay again; it’s on door knobs and stair rails."

When we started to that mound to dig after that, I made it plain that "if you make a mess - at anything - you must clean it up!"


Click here to return to the index
Copyright © 1994-2010 Sue Gerard. All Rights Reserved. No text or images on this website may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the author, except small quotations to be used in reviews.