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New Life - The Cole Family Potters

"Pauline," A.R. Cole asked "Which one do you want me to do, d'you want me to build a pottery shop or build a tobacco barn?" And Pauline said, "Whatever you want to do, it don't make no difference to me." And so with his wife's blessing A.R. Cole became a potter there and then. Although he didn't tell Pauline. She found out a few months later when the building he was working on began to take shape and she noted that the rafters, situated as they were, made it too short to be a tobacco barn. She should have known all along, and maybe she did. The Cole family had been turning pots for three hundred years, dating back to 17th century England. A.R. Cole didn't want to do anything else but be a potter. "They built their own kiln, made their own brick ... and he brought out his first kiln of pottery on the first day of December, 1927, and that's the mornin' I was born," says Neolia Cole. By the mid twenties the Coles were making a family as well as making pottery. Pauline took care of the shop's books and the seven children while A.R. turned out pottery. Once he had turned and fired a truckload of pottery A.R. would travel the fifty miles or so to Sanford, North Carolina, where he sold it to a distributor. He liked the location of Sanford. It was on the number one highway, the main highway from Maine to Florida at the time. It was also central to the universities of Raleigh and Chapel Hill and the military base at Fort Bragg. The location couldn't be much better for a potter to sell his wares. Instead of driving fifty miles to the customer A.R. decided to have the customer come to him. So, in 1934 he left Seagrove for Sanford again. But this time instead of pottery he had his family. The Coles were moving on just as their ancestors had done years ago when they left the villages around Staffordshire, England to make a new life.

Celia and Neolia have been making pottery for over sixty-five years. They learned from their father at a young age how to turn and mix glaze. It wasn't easy learning. They both cried, and maybe A.R. did too, inside a little, when he broke what they had turned and told them to start over. Neolia, on several occasions, vowed never to return to the shop. Celia broke her own pots before her father would do it for her. But they were learning all the time and if he had broke a thousand pots that they had turned it would never dull their affection for their father - "I miss him," says Celia, "I still miss him." Today, Neolia's grandson, Kenneth is carrying on the Cole tradition. He has been making pottery for over twelve years having learned from Neolia and Celia. And as Neolia says "He's been a blessing since he come here." Kenneth has taken over the heavy work of grinding clay in his great granddad's old pug mill, "The process hasn't changed, only thing that's changed is the operator," he says. I guess that's always been the way.