Making Salt-Glazed Pottery

This channel is all about living history, learning more about it and how people do it. This video that you're going to be watching is a great example of living history. My name is Larry Gillam. I've been here at Conner Prairie 37 years now. I started out as an apprentice potter and just gradually learned the trade the old-fashioned way by doing it and bringing myself up year by year. I portray Isaac Barker who is the village potter here in Prairie Town in 1836. Learning on the job in front of people and trying to talk to them at the same time was pretty nerve-wracking. I could barely speak to anyone initially, but then I fell in love with it and at that time I thought I was going to be a musician and I thought well this is a nice side gig until I really get this musician thing going and but then gradually the potter, pottery side of me kind of grew stronger and stronger and thought well this is what I want to be as a potter and so I've just been at it ever since. We're firing our kiln. We've got probably 300 pots or so in there. We have wash pans, mixing bowls, pitchers, jars, jugs, lots and lots of mugs and they're all stacked up in there and we're starting the firing right now and we'll proceed till this afternoon until we reach heat. We started the fire yesterday what a potter would consider the water smoking fire where you drive the moisture out of the kiln. We have little draw trials that we pull out that are dunked in the liner glaze. We can pull those out and quench them and get a visual inspection on what the glazing looks like and then at that point we'll take plain ordinary salt just granulated salt and begin to pour it down a couple of holes in the arch of the kiln and as it falls through it melts and vaporizes and when we feel like we've got the glazing just right we'll stoke it up a couple more times and seal all the openings on the kiln and call it done and then we'll come back in a couple days after it's cooled and begin the unloading. Most exciting part of this for me has been just the learning process and it's just something I've grown to love. It's become part of my DNA, part of my bloodstream. It's a lot of what I think about it yeah it's just every day you just you know after you've done it 20 years you get pretty good at it after you've done it 30 years you get a little better and you just keep growing it's not something that that you're going to remain stagnant at you're just going to keep getting better and better and get a deeper and deeper appreciation for the longer you do it. I want to invite everyone that has an interest or maybe you don't even think you have an interest in old-time traditional crafts such as pottery but come by and visit us sometime and see the magic of the fire the working on the wheel you're not going to be able to go I think to a better place to actually see somebody work that's that's done it for that length of time especially like to invite potters and people that are interested you're going to be coming into an encyclopedia of knowledge here when you come here and so you know come here spend some time ask all the questions you can think of and and you'll get the answers.