Station: [2] Making Pottery

Making pottery requires both a whole-body effort and precision work. 

First, you sit down at the potter’s wheel and apply both feet to the heavy oak flywheel, setting it in motion. Then, you take a lump of clay and throw it on to the centre of the fast-spinning wheel. If the clay lands off-centre, it creates an imbalance. Clay is sprayed in all directions and drags the potter across the wheel. If the clay is properly centred, you draw it upwards on the rotating wheel and shape it as desired.

Special tools were developed to form the pots. After drawing the clay up, you can shape the outside wall of the piece with rectangular or curved throwing ribs. If the pot has a narrow neck, you use a hooked throwing stick to reach inside. 

Potters’ wheels driven by a kick wheel, like this one, were common in Bürgel for at least four centuries. The last hundred years have brought a move to electrically powered wheels – no muscle power required! Nevertheless, the potter’s craft will still make you sweat.

The clay shaped on the wheels came from bell pits in the area surrounding Bürgel. These pits were between 4 and 6 metres or 13 to 20 feet deep – and opened out at the bottom. Any pit that seemed at risk of collapse was abandoned and a new one dug elsewhere. 

The resulting clay first had to be conditioned, which takes a lot of effort. It was mixed with water in a soaking pit, and then trodden to make it smoother. Any unwanted materials that might affect the quality of the finished product were screened out. After the last impurities and air bubbles had been beaten out of the clay, it was thrown on to the wheel – and the finished pot was subsequently fired in a kiln

Selling the finished pots was usually left to the master potters’ wives. If a market day was coming up, a cart would be hired and loaded up with the pots, and the potter’s wife would be driven off to market. There, everything had to be sold – either to end users or to middlemen – and even at below cost, as the market drew to a close. It just wasn’t possible to take unsold goods back home. The return trip usually involved Shank’s pony – until the next market day came around.