Edgefield Courthouse Square and the Pottery Tradition

Edgefield's square has long been the stage for the town's outsized political life. The district sent a remarkable procession of leaders to the South Carolina State House, so many that it earned a reputation as a nursery of governors, and its politics were often fiery and combative in the decades before and after the Civil War. Ben Tillman, a defining and deeply divisive figure of the post-Reconstruction era, came from here, and the town's history holds the full weight of that period, including its violence against Black citizens during Reconstruction.

Today the square is a quieter place, a walkable historic district of brick storefronts, old churches, and small museums gathered around the courthouse. It rewards a slow visit, both for its architecture and for the layered, sometimes difficult history it holds, a place where the ambitions and conflicts of the nineteenth-century South are written into the streets.

In the early 1800s, potters in the Edgefield district developed a distinctive kind of stoneware, thrown from local clay and finished with an alkaline glaze, a technique using wood ash or lime that gave the pottery a glossy, often greenish or brown surface. The style was likely influenced by Asian ceramics known through the era's trade and books, and it took root in Edgefield as nowhere else in America. Kilns and pottery works spread across the district, turning out jars, jugs, and vessels by the thousands.

Much of this pottery was made by enslaved African American potters, whose labor and skill built the industry. The tradition has never fully died, and Edgefield remains a touchstone for collectors, ceramic historians, and potters who study and carry on the alkaline-glaze technique. The town's museums and heritage sites preserve and interpret this remarkable craft.

The most celebrated figure in Edgefield's pottery story is David Drake, an enslaved man born around 1800 who became a master potter of astonishing ability. He threw storage jars of enormous size, some holding many gallons, work that required great strength and skill. What sets his pieces apart is that he inscribed them, often signing his name, dating the vessels, and cutting short rhyming verses into the wet clay.

That he wrote at all was an act of quiet defiance. Laws across the antebellum South forbade teaching enslaved people to read and write, and literacy could bring severe punishment. Drake's verses, by turns practical, witty, and poignant, are among the very few first-person voices of an enslaved craftsman to survive in his own hand, or rather in his own clay. His jars are now treasured in major museums, and he has become a powerful symbol of dignity, artistry, and resistance.

Edgefield sits in the Old 96 District, a name that recalls the colonial-era village of Ninety Six and the sprawling backcountry district of the same number. This is rolling piedmont country, quiet farm and forest land above Augusta, dotted with small historic towns and Revolutionary War sites. The region takes pride in its deep, tangled history.

Nearby Aiken, with its horse country and gardens, and Augusta just across the Georgia line offer more to see within an easy drive, while the Savannah River lakes provide open water and recreation. Edgefield makes a rewarding stop for travelers drawn to Southern history, craft, and the layered stories of the backcountry.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.