David Drake, known as "Dave the Potter," was an enslaved potter in Edgefield, South Carolina, who produced alkaline-glazed stoneware in the decades before and during the U.S. Civil War and frequently signed his jars and sometimes inscribed them with rhyming couplets as assertions of authorship.
July 12, 1834
high
temporal
Describes the practices and identity-asserting inscriptions of an enslaved artisan active in the antebellum and Civil War eras.