Anne Chamlee made these photographs of the abandoned Stevens Pottery mill in August 1990. The rural community was named for the industry that was the largest employer in Baldwin County in the years following the Civil War.
Bill Boyd wrote in the 13 August 1992 edition of the Macon Telegraph: Henry Stevens, who grew up near pottery plants in England, worked his way to America aboard a merchant ship, landed a job as a railroad conductor and arrived in Middle Georgia in 1850. An ambitious and enterprising fellow, Stevens bought a sizable tract of timber land in the southwest corner of Baldwin County in 1854, and he discovered “an extensive and valuable deposit of fire-clay” according to an 1895 book “Memories of Georgia”.
After putting a sawmill into operation in that area, he built kilns and began to produce the first sewerage pipe ever produced in the South. The plant also turned out pottery and stoneware. During the Civil War, Stevens’s plant produced “knives, shoepegs and Joe Brown pipes” for the confederacy according to the history book. And, because of that General William T. Sherman burned the plant to the ground in 1864. Stevens rebuilt the plant after the war and sold it to his sons in 1876. By the turn of the century, the Stevens plant employed some 300 people and produced only brick.
The late T. L. Wood recalled in a 1984 interview with the Associated Press that Stevens Pottery acquired a reputation as a rough-and-tumble town where shootings and stabbings were commonplace at night and on weekends. “My mother wouldn’t let me go down there when I was a kid.” he said. But when he grew up, Wood, like many residents of Stevens Pottery and Coopers worked there for at least a while, and he remembered the plant as a “dirty, dusty, crude-looking place, (where) the work was hard- hauling brick in wheelbarrows and things like that.” Wood escaped the hard labor in the plant by operating a general store; and getting the town’s post office located in his store. But others stayed with the hard work and long hours, and as late as the 1950s, a person could work all of the overtime he or she wanted as the plant turned out brick for the booming sugar refineries in Cuba.
It’s sad to see such wonderful place go sour ! I grew up in Steven’s pottery and all off my family also my grandparents, aunts ,uncle cousin . 4 generation and still have family live there, growing up as kid we lots to do going to baseball games watching your father ,uncles and cousins play against surrounding county’s in middle GA. I can remember time’s walking along sides of the street picking blackberries and raspberries, plums. I would pick blackberries so my would make a homemade pie, she made the best pie ever. As I’m growing up the Williams was the biggest family there in the pottery. There was 3 stores 2 of them belong to wood’s family and the other to pierce family. The pierce store was just down the train tracks which I would walk 3min away had my favorite soda as a kid peach soda and penny wheel cookies.. The plant there when I was a kid was a chalk mine white powder clay,my uncle ans his 2 sons worked there remember the trains stopping loading up heading to Gordon, Macon, McIntyre, Sandersville, Dublin. My home where I live with parents the tracks 30 yards from the double wide trailer we lived it would shake and vibrate the trailer but got so used to that you new what time the trains were coming through. I can go on and on about Steven’s pottery I call my HOME
Very interesting
Enjoy your messages all the time! This one has me a little stumped: You refer to “Joe Brown pipes.”
What are “Joe Brown pipes”?
— John Barrow
255 Milledge Hts. Athens, GA 30606
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I’m not quite sure. “Joe Brown PIKES” were homemade swords of a fashion that the poorly armed Georgia regulars used in the Civil War to supplement whatever weapons they had on hand.