Some potters secede from annual festival

SEAGROVE -- In a community known worldwide for throwing clay, there's a lot of mud-slinging going on.

A fracture has developed among Seagrove's famed potters. Some are so frustrated by the annual Seagrove Pottery Festival that they are planning to boycott that show and hold their own festival.

Opposing sides divide loosely between those who support the Museum of North Carolina Traditional Pottery and those who back the N.C Pottery Center. The two sit a few blocks apart in the tiny business district of Seagrove, south of Asheboro.

The museum, whose mission is to promote local potters, helped launch the center to promote the pottery industry of the state at large. But the governing boards and members of both institutions soon began to complain about the way the other went about its job. They've even sparred over the quality of the maps that each uses to guide tourists to area studios.

Each side has accused the other of financial malfeasance, favoritism and slander. Each claims the other is making a power grab. Each says the dispute could bankrupt one or both of them -- and cause the potters they support to lose business.

"It looks like there is only room for one group there in Seagrove," says Lee Chesson, a woodworker from Lexington who sets up a booth at the annual festival and has taken the museum's side. "Especially in these economic times, everybody should be pulling together to make this the best festival ever."

Disagreements escalated this year, both sides agree, after the death of the museum's longtime director, Richard Gillson. He fell from a ladder while he was working in the museum building.

Museum supporters say that while the board was in mourning and without a leader, the upstart center group tried to steal the festival, a copyrighted event the museum has put on for 26 years.

The festival, always on the weekend before Thanksgiving, features about 200 vendors from Seagrove and other areas. Museum Director Linda Loggains said last year's festival attracted about 3,000 people over two days.

Hard-core fans are said to schedule vacations around the festival, which clears $50,000 to $60,000 for the museum through gate receipts, booth rentals and a pottery auction. The thousands of dollars individual potters can make at the show help many get through the winter.

'Frankenstein letter'

Museum opponents say that with Gillson's death, the museum has come under the influence of board member Don Hudson. They consider him an outsider and say he has run roughshod over the potters of Seagrove in an attempt to further his own Sanford Pottery Festival. It has been held each May since 2002 in Sanford, 50 miles away.

The situation deteriorated this spring when Hudson, a former lawyer who is now a partner in the DK Clay pottery studio in Sanford, wrote an opinion piece he distributed to 30,000 people in advance of the Sanford festival.

It has come to be known as "the Frankenstein letter," because it characterized the N.C. Pottery Center as "Frankenstein's Monster," saying it had spent millions of dollars since its inception and had done little to increase the number of visitors to the area. Hudson scoffed at a failed attempt by the center to get the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources to take it over. He called it a desperate reach by the center for a stable source of funding.

Hudson defended his essay this week, saying, "If there was anything in it that was easily disproved, they would have done so already."

After the piece was distributed, some Seagrove potters, including both supporters of the center and some who had been neutral, demanded that the museum board throw Hudson off. It declined.

The disgruntled potters considered their options, and, a couple of weeks ago, decided to hold their own festival. On the same weekend. A stone's throw from the original festival, which is held under a tent at Seagrove Elementary School.

They call theirs the Festival of Seagrove Potters and say it will include only those who actually work within the 15- or 20-mile radius of Seagrove that most tourists traverse as they go from studio to studio to shop.

On Friday, the group expects the town council to vote on its request for a permit to hold its festival inside the town's former Luck's Beans plant, which has sat empty for the past couple of years.

"This isn't just a bunch of renegades out there trying to cause trouble," says Byron Knight, who runs the Blue Moon Gallery on N.C. 705.

Knight is on the steering committee for the new festival and said the group has the support of at least 50 local potters. "We just don't feel that the museum is working for the good of Seagrove. We feel like we finally have to stand up," he says.

'It's a movement'

Fred Johnston, who put himself through college throwing pots for Seagrove studios and now has a studio of his own downtown with his wife, also supports the new festival. He says it represents far more than just a sales event.

"It's a movement. It's the ... majority of potters asserting their own autonomy and their right to manage their own pottery festival," he says.

"People say that we're tearing the community apart. The community has already been torn apart. This is an opportunity for some healing."