In Great and Noble Jar, Cinda K. Baldwin offers the first authoritative study of South Carolina stoneware and traces the ways in which a rich regional tradition emerged from a unique cultural source.

As Baldwin notes, South Carolina's old legislative district of Edgefield (an area now comprising Edgefield, Aiken, and Greenwood counties) has long been recognized as the place of origin for an alkaline-glazing process that came to characterize pottery produced throughout the lower South. The process developed during the early nineteenth century after the poisonous properties of...