Frankenstein’s Monster
TH E NO RTH C A ROLI NA POT TE RY CE NTE R
A contrarian point of view meant to provoke
debate on issues important to the survival of the
Seagrove Area Potteries as we know them.
WRITTEN BY DON HUDSON
“Creating the North Carolina Pottery Center,”
I often told Richard Gillson during the ten years that
we worked together, “was very much like the
achievement of Dr. Frankenstein in his lab.
It’s impressive to be able to do it, but in the final
analysis one still ends up with a monster running amok.”
Under Richard’s leadership, the Museum of North Carolina Traditional
Pottery devoted years of its existence to helping the Pottery Center be-
come a reality. The Museum purchased nine acres of valuable real es-
tate in downtown Seagrove and gifted it to the center, along with a large
house, pottery, staffing and money to help with operating expenses for
many years.
Completed in 1998, the Pottery Center opened to high hopes and great
expectations. Throughout the last decade, it monopolized financial sup-
port for promoting pottery in the heart of North Carolina, the pottery state.
Year after year, the Center wins generous grants from federal, state
and local governments by focusing on an evolving and ever changing
concept of what it wants to achieve.
Talking about what it has actually done would not be especially flat-
48
tering to the Center. Doing so before an audience with a healthy degree
of skepticism would not be particularly smart.
Between six and seven million dollars have been poured into the Cen-
ter with precious little to show for it.
The record establishes clearly that the majority of the growth in the
Seagrove Area Potteries occurred well before the Center opened. This
growth is directly related to the activities of the Museum that created the
Seagrove Pottery Festival 26 years ago and printed and distributed mil-
lions of maps of the Seagrove Area.
When the Pottery Center ended up with the land, the buildings, the pot-
tery collection and access to lobbyists, fundraisers and staff, it quickly
forgot its roots and did nothing better than feed a voracious appetite for
fundraising.
The number of visitors to the Center remains anemic, even by the Cen-
ter’s own reckoning and cynics abound who question its claims.
Worse, no studies have ever been conducted to show that the Center
pulls any significant number of new visitors into Seagrove that were not
already coming for other reasons.
It is a fact that the Center has managed to spend less than two per-
cent of its revenues on advertising.
Anybody who seriously wanted to help the Seagrove Area Potteries
might do well to consider the merits of relocating the Center to Hickory
or Charlotte where it could send new visitors to Seagrove instead of tak-
ing the customers that Seagrove earned on its own and sending them to
buy pottery elsewhere.
The Center’s collection of North Carolina pottery is far eclipsed by
other collections open to the public.
The Center shows little interest in supporting anything that
promotes pottery without having at least the potential to produce rev-
enues for the Center.
On the Sunday of the last Seagrove Pottery Festival, the Center was
not even open and made no effort to appeal to the thousands of visitors
that the festival undeniably pulls every year to the school directly across
the street from the Center.
The Center was missing in action when the Sanford Pottery Festival
and the State Fair Pottery Display were created with Richard’s help in
order to attract more customers from beyond
Seagrove and pull them into the area year
round.
The Center benefits financially from the
Catawba Valley Pottery Festival and
produces an auction every year that raises up
to forty thousand dollars for the Center.
Few things prove more that “where your
treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Between its auction and its gift shop, the Cen-
ter takes almost a hundred thousand dollars a
year that might have been spent otherwise at a
local pottery shop. When it was being sold to
the local potters, the Center promised that it
would never sell pottery in its gift shop and few
potteries that pay taxes can afford to compete
with the Center.
Recently added to the Center’s wish list is its
perceived need to add on and to buy expensive
A brief exchange that could be
of interest to those who believe in the
public’s right to know.
“With the possibility that the state and/or the
County of Randolph will be taking over
responsibilities for running the
N.C. Pottery Center, it seems likely
that many more people ought to want to
know more about the operations of the
Center heretofore.”
--E-mail of March 8, 2008 from Don Hudson to
Denny Mecham, Executive Director of the
N.C. Pottery Center, transmitting a request
for information
“The North Carolina Pottery Center Executive
Committee has reviewed your March 8 request for
information and has determined that the
Pottery Center, as a private nonprofit, will not be
releasing any information at this time”
--E-mail sent by Denny Mecham to Hudson on
March 18, 2008
landscaping and sidewalks whose effect
could only be to keep more people in down-
town Seagrove.
The real vitality of the Seagrove Area Pot-
teries is found in the scores of pottery shops
surrounding Seagrove and spread out over
five counties.
For almost three full decades, the Museum
gave every potter in the Seagrove Area plenty of
opportunities to connect with pottery collectors.
In contrast, the Center selectively chooses
to promote certain potters at the expense of
others. Potters who support the Center tend
to get supported by the Center. Those who
don’t, don’t.
Under a succession of directors, one last-
ing but a single day, the relationship between
the Center and the Museum that brought it into
existence atrophied.
The Center usually claims to be a victim of
circumstances beyond its control and repre-
sents that it alone can provide leadership in a
fractious community. By playing to its favorites,
rewarding those who support the Center and
punishing those who do not, it plants seeds of dis-
cord and strife in a community already under the
stress of intense competition from within and
even more so from without.
The Center behaves like a dog that keeps
biting the hand that feeds it and then whines
that it isn’t getting petted often enough.
The Museum, it should be remembered,
made the Center possible; not the other way
around. Other than taking from the Museum,
I’m not aware of any way that the Center found
to give back or to work in a spirit of cooperation
with Richard or the Museum.
Instead, the Center’s approach consistently
betrays an arrogance for making up its own
rules as it goes along.
An early shot to the heart of the Seagrove
community occurred when the Center caused
all the highway directional signs that brought
travelers into Seagrove to be taken up, leaving
only the signs that directed visitors specifically
to the Pottery Center.
It is not mere paranoia that some potters
have long suspected that the Center wished to
dominate the Seagrove Area by hook or crook.
Its present exhibit purports to be “The
Potters of Seagrove Today.” Unfortunately, two
counties that the North Carolina legislature rec-
ognized as being parts of the “Seagrove Area,”
Lee and Chatham, were completely excluded.
An early meeting held in an undisclosed basement
in Seagrove to discuss possible strategies for
animating the North Carolina Pottery Center.
That events produced in and by potters from
Sanford help to direct hundreds of thousands
of dollars of sales into the Seagrove Area every
year and the fact that Seagrove and Sanford
have been tied together by over eighty years of
pottery making history, rates no consideration
by the Center.
The success of the Seagrove Area occurred
over a period of time during which there were
few potters left in North Carolina and most of
those who were famous were located in Sea-
grove, Sanford, Moore County and Mont-
gomery County.
Today, there are over a thousand potters in
North Carolina. Six colleges and universities in
the state churn out more each year. People who
like pottery can find dozens of potters at scores
of craft fairs all over North Carolina. Galleries
have been created across the state represent-
ing the work of hundreds of potters throughout
the year.
Ultimately, Seagrove and the area that it an-
chors will lose if it is regarded as just another
place where pottery is made.
Insofar as the interests of the Seagrove pot-
tery community are considered, what is needed
is an organization that dedicates itself to the pri-
macy of pottery making traditions in the area.
That and that alone is what pulls economic
tourism into Seagrove and sends it out all over
the area to nurture the independent and re-
sourceful artisans who, for love of clay, hold on
and try to keep going.
The North Carolina Pottery Center is trying
now to gift itself to the State of North Carolina
in order to make certain that it is never booted
off of a gravy train that has been lucrative for it
thus far.
SANFORD POTTERY FESTIVAL 2008 | 49
 Frankenstein’s Monster continued...
One looks in vain to find a plan that asks how it is that
the Center could have so little to show for the $350,000 in
operating expenses that it burns through each year, let
alone a budget that confronts how the State of North
Carolina could achieve more for less and free up re-
sources to support a broader variety of initiatives to pro-
mote pottery.
This is a plan that needs careful and complete inves-
tigation and that does not need to be pushed through
with vague professions of good intentions.
One should not dance casually on the edge of a
precipice beside a very steep and slippery slope. A
state takeover of the Center would send the wrong mes-
sage to a long line of similar programs whose value lies
more in true grassroots support and private initiative
rather than government bailouts.
Before it gets into the Governor’s budget, before the
Council of State ever sees it and well before the General
Assembly is asked to commit untold millions of taxpayer
dollars to the Center over the next ten years, it’s time to
do two simple things that should have been done long
before the last six million dollars was spent:
1. Conduct a thorough survey on what does and does
not bring economic tourism into Seagrove and the pot-
tery area surrounding Seagrove.
2. Tell the Center that it’s on its own until it proves that it
is capable of working effectively with others whose ac-
tivities well predate the Center and actually made it pos-
sible.
Those who love North Carolina pottery should
want to hand the Pottery Center a book on
manners because putting a blank check in its
control would be like handing a bazooka to
Frankenstein’s monster.
Opposite Photo:
Don Hudson created the Sanford Pottery Festival and the
State Fair Pottery Display. Both were inspired and
supported by Richard Gillson, the founder of the Seagrove
Pottery Festival. For ten years, Hudson worked with
Gillson to help make the Seagrove Pottery Festival grow.
The views expressed herein are personal views held by
Don Hudson and are not presented as reflecting official
policy of either the Sanford Pottery Festival or the
Seagrove Pottery Festival.
Don Hudson can be contacted at
donhudson@alltel.net
50
HATEFUL IS AS HATEFUL DOES
How Randolph County Manager Richard Wells tried to take the
Seagrove Pottery Festival awayfrom the Museum
nd give itto the N.C. Pottery Center
Randolph County Commissioners would do well to ask some tough questions
about why County Manager Richard Wells recently tried to take from the Museum
of N.C. Traditional Pottery its main fundraising activity and, adding insult to injury,
his apparently brutal determination to force the Museum to give effective control of
this event to the N.C. Pottery Center.
Precedent for such an abuse of power is long-standing and can be found in the
Old Testament account of how King David, not content with his many wives and the
measure of wealth he had been given, took Uriah’s only wife, Bath Sheba, for his
own and found it expedient to see that Uriah’s life was taken to cover his tracks.
More recently, Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin, honed the fine art of extorting private
property to give to state sanctioned enterprises.
Wells’ recent move against the Museum promised to be similarly lethal and
could only have killed the Museum that has served the Seagrove Area so well.
The Museum created the Seagrove Pottery Festival in 1982 at Seagrove Ele-
mentary School, where it has been held every year since. The festival is the largest
event in Seagrove and each year nourishes the local pottery economy by bringing
thousands of collectors to town.
Proceeds from the Seagrove Festival have allowed the Museum, over the years,
to promote the traditions of pottery making in the Seagrove Area. For many years,
just like Uriah served King David well, the Museum focused its efforts on support-
ing the creation of the N.C. Pottery Center and donated to the Center the nine acres
of valuable real estate upon which it now sits.
After the Center was established, it received millions of dollars in support, in-
cluding almost $250,000 from Randolph County and $1.5 million from the State of
North Carolina over the ten years of its existence.
Having done more than its fair share to help the Center and in light of the Cen-
ter’s generous income, the Museum turned its attention over the last few years to
promoting the pottery of the Seagrove Area exclusively.
Despite the huge resources put at its disposal, the Center failed to live up to ear-
lier promises to bring more economic tourism into Seagrove. In fact, it appears
mostly to serve the purpose of taking the visitors who would otherwise have come
into the Area and telling them that there are many other places to purchase pottery
in North Carolina.
Notwithstanding annual budgets of $350,000 a year, the Center for the last
decade has been showing signs of fiscal distress and, by its own admission, has
gotten by only by existing unacceptably “hand to mouth.”
The proposed solution for the Center’s ills does not seem to involve living within
its means and finding a way to work in partnership with other organizations that
promote pottery. Essentially handed a blank check by state and local governments,
the Center has never especially felt the need to
engage in team sports while it could believe
that it owns the entire ballpark.
The State and Randolph County have been
exploring a “partnership” in which the State
would take possession of the Center and would
pay to operate it while the County of Randolph
would take responsibility for upkeep on the
building that was constructed brand spanking
new, but that now needs about $100,000 worth
of work and upgrades to put back in good re-
pair.
The Museum purchased an old grocery store
in downtown Seagrove where it intends to op-
erate a Welcome and Information Center high-
lighting the potters of the Seagrove Area.
To do so required the Museum board to go
out on a limb; which it was comfortable doing
under the leadership of Richard Gillson, who
created the Seagrove Pottery Festival and
worked tirelessly to promote the Seagrove Area
for 27 years.
Gillson died unexpectedly in January of this
year as the result of a tragic accident that oc-
curred while he was working at the Museum of-
fice.
Board members resolved to keep Gillson’s
dream of providing a permanent home for the
Museum alive while some are still trying to work
through their own grief at losing a friend and in-
spirational figure with whom they had worked
for decades.
Wells, obviously without considering how cal-
lous his actions were, moved with ruthless effi-
ciency to deny the Museum any opportunity to
carry on.
Wells contacted the Superintendent of Pub-
lic Schools for Randolph County and directed
him that he was to issue an order to the princi-
pal of Seagrove Elementary not to allow any
pottery related group to use its grounds.
Quickly following up on this coup, Wells met
with the Executive Committee of the Museum
board, one of whom described the county man-
ager’s attitude as “abusive, insulting and mak-
ing clear how important he felt he was to justify
what he was doing.”
Wells informed those present that, seeing as
the Museum had just lost its biggest fundrais-
ing activity, it should face up to reality, accede to
the Center taking over the Seagrove Festival,
sell its buildings and become a mere ap-
pendage housed at the Center.
In doing so, Wells certainly did not consider
how inappropriate the Center’s grounds are for
hosting such an event or the expenses that
would have to be borne to make it workable.
What is good for the goose is not always ac-
cepted as being good for the gander.
One shortcoming of the Center as a location
for the Seagrove Festival is an absence of park-
ing, available only in sufficient quantity across
the street at Seagrove Elementary school. The
logic of the County Manager’s position was to
deprive the Museum of the right to hold its fes-
tival where it has been held for the last 26 years,
but make this same venue available to the Cen-
ter to provide it with the parking necessary to
hold the event at the Center.
The job description for the Manager of Ran-
dolph County does not include kicking private,
non-profit groups into submission or taking
away the fundraising events they created in
order to gift its revenues to a favored group that
would see only an incremental increase in its
bottom line at the expense of completely de-
stroying the first.
The Seagrove Pottery Festival has been the
largest cash cow for the pottery community and
the Town of Seagrove for over 26 years. It is the
largest of several events held by the Museum
each year to bring visitors into Seagrove.
Wells seems not to have considered that the
trademark, “Seagrove Pottery Festival,” be-
longs to the Museum that created it or that it
could travel very nicely to a location beyond
Seagrove and even outside of Randolph
County.
Some members of the Museum board have
proposed taking the event to Greensboro to re-
duce the logistical expenses of producing the
show and to reach a larger audience, with the
goal of funneling more business into the Sea-
grove Area throughout the year and increasing
profits to help the Museum pay for the building
it wants to operate in Seagrove as a Welcome
and Information Center.
Gillson wanted to keep the Seagrove Pottery
Festival in Seagrove, but the actions under-
taken by Wells certainly call into question the
advisability of doing so.
The Museum has many options to improve its
economic situation and the strength of almost
two decades more service to the local pottery
community than the Center, which was made
possible by the Museum to begin with, boasts.
If Wells really believes that his job is to make
decisions as to which non-profits are “eco-
nomically viable” and to kill off some in favor
of those that he likes, he needs to be asked
why he thinks it is the Pottery Center that is
viable and the Museum that is not.
Back out all the government money that
has been given to the Center and it be-
comes clear that, but for the heavy and gener-
ous hand of government, the Pottery Center
could not have continued to spend so much
while achieving so little.
Let Randolph County and the State of North
Carolina spread its resources for organizations
that promote pottery with a modicum of impar-
tiality and fairness and the smart money would
bet on the Museum as being more likely to out-
last the Center than not.
In point of fact, the Museum has never put it-
self in a position of being so needy that it had
to ask the state to take it over or beg the county
to provide routine maintenance on its buildings.
Governments ought to consider funding the
Museum in the same manner as the Center and
revisit the issue in a year or two of taking over
the Pottery Center completely when the Center,
playing on a level field, has proven that it can
make it on its own, as the Museum has for al-
most three decades.
Commissioners and all non-profits in Ran-
dolph County should want to know what went
wrong here and how to make amends.
An important question is whether Mr. Wells
acted entirely on his own or in concert with oth-
ers who might have had a financial stake in the
outcome.
For months, partisans of the Pottery Center
have been spreading rumors that there was a
plan to force the Museum to give its festival to
the Center.
The leadership of the Center was aware of
Mr. Wells’ decision before most members of the
board of the Museum heard about it and ex-
pressed that plans were already underway for
the Center to take over the Seagrove Festival.
The question comes down to, “Who knew
what and when did they know it?”
If these questions are not answered, then the
possibility that a corruption of power will result
in a cover up must be faced.
SANFORD POTTERY FESTIVAL 2008 | 51