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would roll out short pieces of soft clay for handles. These consisted of
a slab lifter on one side of a churn and a looped ear on the other. One
end of the latter was affixed to the vessel wall and the free end carefully
coaxed to the required length, clipped off, and pressed in place.
Rough, artless affairs, these handles were nevertheless sturdy and
unlikely to break off. 3 A last task before setting the unburned ware
in the back room for final drying was to scratch the gallon capacity
beneam the lifter in vessels of greater than one gallon size, the
numeral being incised with the ball of the potter's forefinger.
GLAZING THE WARE
Cheever Meaders's favorite and most dependable glaze was his ash
glaze. Although in later life he prepared his own glazes infrequently —
using commercial materials as a substitute —he nevertheless
husbanded his energies for this finish. In preparing the ash glaze,
Cheever would first gamer ashes from the kiln firebox, sifting out
rocks, fire coals, nails, and other foreign matter in the process. At the
same time, he would send Lanier across the road behind the homeplace
to collect buckets full of red silt settlin's to be ground up wim the
ashes. 4 These setdin's, which served as a binder to keep the ashes from
flowing off the ware, were similar to pottery clay and, like die latter,
tended to change "hog by hog and sow by sow" in the meadow ground
because "mat's what's buried there." Regardless of this fact, Lanier
explained, they served their purpose well.
Previously, Lanier would have scoured the neighborhood for
broken window panes and discarded soft drink botdes, an errand he
remembered running frequendy as a youth. The glass was used to
control the glaze's melting temperature but also gave it a lustrous
appearance. Tamping the broken sherds into a fine powder, using an
iron rod and an auto oil pan for his mortar and pesde (fig. 26), at
length he collected the end product in a tin can.
In mixing the three ingredients, the setdin's were first sifted through
a strainer and then combined with the wood ashes. Measurements
were not very exact (an "old crude process," offered Lanier): roughly
two large churns of setdin's to three of ashes. Added to this was a
much smaller quantity of the powdered glass plus water from a rain
barrel, the only source of water at the work site. In all, Cheever and
Lanier made up mirty or forty gallons of glazing solution, which they
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