Three Formerly Enslaved Artists Created Beautiful Pottery 150 Years Ago, and Now Their Wares Are Coveted Around the World
Three Formerly Enslaved Artists Created Beautiful Pottery 150 Years Ago, and Now Their Wares Are Coveted Around the World
The stunning vessels from the H. Wilson & Company were forgotten for generations, only to gain new appreciation for the craftsmanship that went into them
Photographs by DeSean McClinton-Holland
Jacoba Urist
June 2025
A jar made by H. Wilson & Company in Capote, Texas. Right, the muddy banks of Salt Creek, a tributary of the Guadalupe River about 50 miles northeast of San Antonio, where Wilson’s pottery company sourced its fine red clay.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; DeSean McClinton-Holland
In 1856, the Reverend John McKamie Wilson Jr., a Presbyterian minister and entrepreneur interested in clay science, relocated from North Carolina to Texas. There in the Capote Hills—a rural, sparse enclave in Guadalupe County, 12 miles from the town of Seguin—Wilson opened a business called Guadalupe Pottery. Wilson mainly sold jugs, churns, crocks and cemetery flower jars. The pots featured crescent handles and a deep chocolate-colored interior of liquefied clay. Before refrigerators and iceboxes, high-fire, nonporous pottery was essential to life—the Tupperware or Ziploc bags of the 19th century. Clay pots preserved everything from grains, beef and butter to whiskey and even drinking water. The potters who worked under Wilson’s direction mostly used alkaline glaze, one of the oldest methods in ceramics, to create a glassy exterior from a slurry of wood ash, sand and clay. An arduous process in the 1850s, it took days to stoke underground wood-burning kilns to a high enough temperature for a successful firing.
Three of Wilson’s potters were enslaved servants who traveled to Texas with him—Hiram, James and Wallace. For more than a decade, these men were responsible for nearly every facet of Guadalupe Pottery’s production: from mixing clay and expertly “throwing” the pots on a kick wheel to glazing and stacking vessels and meticulously controlling the temperature and duration of the kiln’s flames. The men kept working for the reverend even after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. In Texas, slavery didn’t end until June 19, 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston and issued General Order No. 3, informing the people of Texas that all who’d been enslaved were free—the event commemorated as Juneteenth.
Paula King Harper, a descendant of Hiram Wilson, sits on the steps of the Sebastopol House in Seguin, Texas, with Wilson vessels from her own collection. Harper leads the Wilson Pottery Foundation and coordinates the Wilson Pottery Show each October.
DeSean McClinton-Holland
Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just This article is a selection from the June 2025 issue of Smithsonian magazine
In 1869, Hiram founded his own stoneware business at a new site with James and Wallace, H. Wilson & Company.Some scholars believe that H. Wilson & Company was the first business in Texas founded and owned by formerly enslaved people.
Pots created by the hands of Hiram Wilson and his colleagues have been passed down through households and sold at garage sales over the course of many generations. Today, their rich history, as well as their distinctive styles and glazes, make the jugs sought-after acquisitions for museum collections. Left to right: A preserve jar, a three-gallon butter churn and a large jar with a lid from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; a stoneware jar from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; NMAH
A century and a half later, the pots they made are celebrated in the ceramics world. In silvery grays and greens, with uneven salt drips and textured glazes that resemble the moon’s surface or, sometimes, an orange peel, Wilson wares are coveted both as objets d’art and for their extraordinary story of Black self-determination in the postwar South. Wilson pottery now resides in museums across the United States, from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston—an indelible part of the country’s entrepreneurial and creative heritage.
The story of Hiram, James and Wallace Wilson is woven through with threads of folklore, given the sparse records kept at that time, particularly for people born into slavery. But over the last 50 years, researchers have uncovered more details about the Wilsons. Georgeanna Greer—a San Antonio pediatrician and ceramics collector-aficionado—was passionate about locating abandoned kilns, and she left a trove of Wilson information behind, including a 1973 taped interview with James Wilson’s son, James Wilson Jr.
Capote Baptist Church has been in the midst of a restoration since 2012. After a new pastor, Terry Williams, arrived, its membership surged from 4 congregants to 85.
DeSean McClinton-Holland
A wooden cross on the property of the Capote Baptist Church that Hiram Wilson founded in 1872
DeSean McClinton-Holland
Emancipation offered the Wilsons an opportunity none had ever expected. Establishing a pottery business was complex and costly. It meant finding a suitable site, testing clay, constructing a kiln and hiring proficient workers. And the men did all this in an “intensely dangerous environment,” said Ashley Williams, a recent fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In the late 1860s, Black residents of Guadalupe County “filed almost 200 complaints with the Freedmen’s Bureau for unpaid wages and violent crimes” perpetrated against them. A Baptist missionary from Maine, the Reverend Leonard Ilsley, helped Hiram buy 600 acres of land for and likely either gave Hiram a personal loan or served as a guarantor in the transaction. When Hiram died in 1884—survived by his wife, Senia, and 11 children—Ilsley served as administrator of his estate.
One of Hiram’s great-great-granddaughters, LaVerne Lewis Britt, first discovered her connection to the potters after her retirement, when she became interested in genealogy. Over the course of five years, she researched and wrote a book called In Praise of Hiram Wilson, which describes how her ancestor created a thriving post-slavery community in Capote. Hiram set aside 10 of his 600 acres for a Baptist church and became its minister. The white steepled chapel remains active today, beside a cemetery with cedar and crape myrtle trees. Many Wilsons have been laid to rest there, including Hiram, whose grave is marked by a tall obelisk.
Pastor Terry Williams has been leading the Capote Baptist Church since 2015. When he arrived, he says, he felt the spirit of Hiram Wilson and other former slaves who founded the church in 1872—“a cold breeze coming up in the summertime.”
DeSean McClinton-Holland
A Bible rests on the piano at Capote Baptist Church. Right, the building has been in the midst of a restoration since 2012. After Pastor Williams arrived, its membership surged from 4 congregants to 85.
Hiram also founded a one-room schoolhouse where Paula King Harper, another of his descendants, says her grandmother once taught. King Harper is the current president of the Wilson Pottery Foundation. On the phone, she described how interest in her celebrated ancestor’s technique has spread in collector circles since the organization’s founding in 1999. A pottery collector in San Antonio was at a garage sale and noticed the green salt glaze drip from underneath dirt that had dried on a gallon jug. “They purchased it for less than went home, cleaned it up, and guess what it was? A stamped H. Wilson.” Finding that stamp is now the equivalent of finding a signed painting by a renowned artist. King Harper once sat at an auction that included several pieces of Wilson pottery from someone’s private estate. “There was a beautiful, pristine five-gallon jug I watched sell for ” she said.
Traditionally, clay artists, who made quotidian jugs and jars rather than purely aesthetic works, have been considered second-tier makers, ranking below sculptors. But over the last few decades, contemporary and historic ceramicists like the Wilsons are receiving new scholarly and art-world attention. Williams, the recent Smithsonian fellow, is researching the Wilsons as part of her doctorate at Columbia University. She notes that most enslaved potters wouldn’t have been able to inscribe their names or initials on a pot. But once the Wilson potters were free, they added a maker’s mark, which made all the difference. Future generations were able to dive into the records and find out more about the remarkable potters. “Because we can tie the makers to these objects, which is so rare, it allows us to see the story about the resilience of the Wilson potters during slavery, and their extreme success and survival,” Williams said.
Elmer Joe Brackner Jr. was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Texas when he unearthed buried ceramic shards and located the original kilns at two different H. Wilson & Company sites.
DeSean McClinton-Holland
Ashley Williams, a recent pre-doctoral fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, has been researching the Wilson potters as part of her PhD dissertation on crafts made by enslaved and imprisoned artists.
DeSean McClinton-Holland
The Wilsons’ style may have been influenced by the works coming out of the Edgefield district in South Carolina, a place then known as a kind of pottery Mecca. It was famous for massive, bulbous jars and glazes, features that the early Wilson pots share. Edgefield has its own significant history of highly skilled Black craftsmen, including David Drake, the earliest known enslaved potter to inscribe his work.
CollectorsDeSean McClinton-Holland
Later, the Wilsons’ pottery took on more distinctive features. The men started out using alkaline glaze, but once they opened their own business they switched to salt glaze, likely for its strength and waterproofing properties. Salt glaze also produces more consistent colors and textures, such as the bumpy orange-peel finish admired by H. Wilson & Company collectors. At the time, the method was uncommon in Texas, according to Michelle Johnson, project manager of the William J. Hill Texas Artisans and Artists Archive at the Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, part of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. “And it was dangerous,” she said, because salt glaze produces highly toxic chlorine gas from the wet salt thrown into the kiln during firing.The Wilsons may have learned the technique from Isaac Suttles, an Ohio-born potter known for salt glazing, who is listed in the United States census as living in Seguin at the time.
The Sebastopol House, a Greek Revival home, was built in the 1850s by enslaved laborers who had advanced skills in working with concrete. Today, the building houses the Wilson Pottery Museum.
DeSean McClinton-Holland
Lid rims are another notable element of H. Wilson & Company’s jars. At the first pottery-making site, during their enslavement, the men made more tie-down rims—jars without lids that require paper or cloth as a cover, which were easier and faster to make. Later, at their own shop, they crafted rims fitted for lids. Those lid rims allowed for more watertightstorage, but they also required more sophisticated expertise.If you think you may have stumbled on one of these treasures at a garage or estate sale, look for a horseshoe-like handle—the most significant visual identifier of a Wilson pot. It’s still unclear why Hiram, James and Wallace switched to these thicker, rolled handles from their original Edgefield-inspired crescents. It may have been because horseshoe handles are sturdier, offering more surface connection to the pot’s body. It’s another puzzling question that Williams is pursuing and hopes to answer in the future.
It took a long time for the art world to discover the Wilsons’ creations. After Hiram’s death in 1884, James and Wallace Wilson went on to work at another pottery site run by Marion Durham, a potter from South Carolina who had moved to Texas with John Chandler, who was most likely his enslaved servant at the time. By the time the Wilsons joined them, Durham and Chandler were in business together. That site closed in 1903. These pots remained in circulation, but many details of their story were lost.
Modern replicas of the Wilson pottery logo created by Earline Green.
DeSean McClinton-Holland
Earline Green, an educator and a member of the Wilson Pottery Foundation’s board of directors. Green helps promote the potters’ legacy by demonstrating their innovative 19th-century techniques.
DeSean McClinton-Holland
Decades later, an anthropology graduate student named Elmer Joe Brackner Jr. conducted a magnetometry survey to find buried pottery.At the original Guadalupe Pottery site he found what’s known as a “groundhog kiln,” a uniquely Southern, semi-subterranean kiln used in the 19th century for firing alkaline-glazed pottery. At the second site, home of the independent H. Wilson & Company, Brackner found ceramic-glazed shards and another groundhog kiln. His research, and that of Georgeanna Greer, the ceramic historian, helped piece together the Wilsons’ unusual story. After many years of advocacy by the Wilson Pottery Foundation, art historians and curators began scouring land deeds, court documents and handwritten capacity marksto present a fuller picture of the Wilsons, sometimes correcting previous theories about their methodology and timeline. Texas ceramic artist Earline Green researches the Wilsons’ past while creating her own pottery to honor their legacy. In 2018, she interviewed Wilson descendants and collectors and visited historical societies in Texas for archival information. Two years later, she curated an exhibition on her campus in Fort Worth; the show also displayed ceramic pieces she created based on the work of the Wilson potters.
Deacon Willie Hightower Sr., a descendant of Hiram Wilson and one of the current deacons at Capote Baptist Church.
DeSean McClinton-Holland
Hiram Wilson’sDeSean McClinton-Holland
The narrative continues to evolve, due in no small part to proud descendants of Hiram, James and Wallace. Every three years, hundreds of people gather in Seguin, Texas, for a jubilant three-day Wilson family reunion that is open to the public. In 2023, festivities included the Wilson Pottery Foundation gala and a tenth anniversary celebration at the Wilson Pottery Museum. The last reunion fell on the weekend before Juneteenth, and the reunion committee arranged a kickoff concert Sunday evening followed by Juneteenth events in Seguin’s downtown square.
“I was fortunate to grow up in Texas in the 1980s, around the time when our cousin LaVerne Lewis Britt had uncovered the history,” explains DeSean McClinton-Holland, the photographer of this story and a Wilson descendant through his maternal grandmother. “I grew up knowing bits of the story and visiting the church.” He describes the process of documenting Hiram Wilson’s legacy as a healing journey. “To think, he was born into slavery and was able to accomplish so much shortly thereafter,” he says. “It’s inspiring and motivating to think of all the freedoms we have now, and that we really have to push a bit harder.”
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#three #formerly #enslaved #artists #createdThree Formerly Enslaved Artists Created Beautiful Pottery 150 Years Ago, and Now Their Wares Are Coveted Around the World
Three Formerly Enslaved Artists Created Beautiful Pottery 150 Years Ago, and Now Their Wares Are Coveted Around the World
The stunning vessels from the H. Wilson & Company were forgotten for generations, only to gain new appreciation for the craftsmanship that went into them
Photographs by DeSean McClinton-Holland
Jacoba Urist
June 2025
A jar made by H. Wilson & Company in Capote, Texas. Right, the muddy banks of Salt Creek, a tributary of the Guadalupe River about 50 miles northeast of San Antonio, where Wilson’s pottery company sourced its fine red clay.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; DeSean McClinton-Holland
In 1856, the Reverend John McKamie Wilson Jr., a Presbyterian minister and entrepreneur interested in clay science, relocated from North Carolina to Texas. There in the Capote Hills—a rural, sparse enclave in Guadalupe County, 12 miles from the town of Seguin—Wilson opened a business called Guadalupe Pottery. Wilson mainly sold jugs, churns, crocks and cemetery flower jars. The pots featured crescent handles and a deep chocolate-colored interior of liquefied clay. Before refrigerators and iceboxes, high-fire, nonporous pottery was essential to life—the Tupperware or Ziploc bags of the 19th century. Clay pots preserved everything from grains, beef and butter to whiskey and even drinking water. The potters who worked under Wilson’s direction mostly used alkaline glaze, one of the oldest methods in ceramics, to create a glassy exterior from a slurry of wood ash, sand and clay. An arduous process in the 1850s, it took days to stoke underground wood-burning kilns to a high enough temperature for a successful firing.
Three of Wilson’s potters were enslaved servants who traveled to Texas with him—Hiram, James and Wallace. For more than a decade, these men were responsible for nearly every facet of Guadalupe Pottery’s production: from mixing clay and expertly “throwing” the pots on a kick wheel to glazing and stacking vessels and meticulously controlling the temperature and duration of the kiln’s flames. The men kept working for the reverend even after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. In Texas, slavery didn’t end until June 19, 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston and issued General Order No. 3, informing the people of Texas that all who’d been enslaved were free—the event commemorated as Juneteenth.
Paula King Harper, a descendant of Hiram Wilson, sits on the steps of the Sebastopol House in Seguin, Texas, with Wilson vessels from her own collection. Harper leads the Wilson Pottery Foundation and coordinates the Wilson Pottery Show each October.
DeSean McClinton-Holland
Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just This article is a selection from the June 2025 issue of Smithsonian magazine
In 1869, Hiram founded his own stoneware business at a new site with James and Wallace, H. Wilson & Company.Some scholars believe that H. Wilson & Company was the first business in Texas founded and owned by formerly enslaved people.
Pots created by the hands of Hiram Wilson and his colleagues have been passed down through households and sold at garage sales over the course of many generations. Today, their rich history, as well as their distinctive styles and glazes, make the jugs sought-after acquisitions for museum collections. Left to right: A preserve jar, a three-gallon butter churn and a large jar with a lid from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; a stoneware jar from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; NMAH
A century and a half later, the pots they made are celebrated in the ceramics world. In silvery grays and greens, with uneven salt drips and textured glazes that resemble the moon’s surface or, sometimes, an orange peel, Wilson wares are coveted both as objets d’art and for their extraordinary story of Black self-determination in the postwar South. Wilson pottery now resides in museums across the United States, from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston—an indelible part of the country’s entrepreneurial and creative heritage.
The story of Hiram, James and Wallace Wilson is woven through with threads of folklore, given the sparse records kept at that time, particularly for people born into slavery. But over the last 50 years, researchers have uncovered more details about the Wilsons. Georgeanna Greer—a San Antonio pediatrician and ceramics collector-aficionado—was passionate about locating abandoned kilns, and she left a trove of Wilson information behind, including a 1973 taped interview with James Wilson’s son, James Wilson Jr.
Capote Baptist Church has been in the midst of a restoration since 2012. After a new pastor, Terry Williams, arrived, its membership surged from 4 congregants to 85.
DeSean McClinton-Holland
A wooden cross on the property of the Capote Baptist Church that Hiram Wilson founded in 1872
DeSean McClinton-Holland
Emancipation offered the Wilsons an opportunity none had ever expected. Establishing a pottery business was complex and costly. It meant finding a suitable site, testing clay, constructing a kiln and hiring proficient workers. And the men did all this in an “intensely dangerous environment,” said Ashley Williams, a recent fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In the late 1860s, Black residents of Guadalupe County “filed almost 200 complaints with the Freedmen’s Bureau for unpaid wages and violent crimes” perpetrated against them. A Baptist missionary from Maine, the Reverend Leonard Ilsley, helped Hiram buy 600 acres of land for and likely either gave Hiram a personal loan or served as a guarantor in the transaction. When Hiram died in 1884—survived by his wife, Senia, and 11 children—Ilsley served as administrator of his estate.
One of Hiram’s great-great-granddaughters, LaVerne Lewis Britt, first discovered her connection to the potters after her retirement, when she became interested in genealogy. Over the course of five years, she researched and wrote a book called In Praise of Hiram Wilson, which describes how her ancestor created a thriving post-slavery community in Capote. Hiram set aside 10 of his 600 acres for a Baptist church and became its minister. The white steepled chapel remains active today, beside a cemetery with cedar and crape myrtle trees. Many Wilsons have been laid to rest there, including Hiram, whose grave is marked by a tall obelisk.
Pastor Terry Williams has been leading the Capote Baptist Church since 2015. When he arrived, he says, he felt the spirit of Hiram Wilson and other former slaves who founded the church in 1872—“a cold breeze coming up in the summertime.”
DeSean McClinton-Holland
A Bible rests on the piano at Capote Baptist Church. Right, the building has been in the midst of a restoration since 2012. After Pastor Williams arrived, its membership surged from 4 congregants to 85.
Hiram also founded a one-room schoolhouse where Paula King Harper, another of his descendants, says her grandmother once taught. King Harper is the current president of the Wilson Pottery Foundation. On the phone, she described how interest in her celebrated ancestor’s technique has spread in collector circles since the organization’s founding in 1999. A pottery collector in San Antonio was at a garage sale and noticed the green salt glaze drip from underneath dirt that had dried on a gallon jug. “They purchased it for less than went home, cleaned it up, and guess what it was? A stamped H. Wilson.” Finding that stamp is now the equivalent of finding a signed painting by a renowned artist. King Harper once sat at an auction that included several pieces of Wilson pottery from someone’s private estate. “There was a beautiful, pristine five-gallon jug I watched sell for ” she said.
Traditionally, clay artists, who made quotidian jugs and jars rather than purely aesthetic works, have been considered second-tier makers, ranking below sculptors. But over the last few decades, contemporary and historic ceramicists like the Wilsons are receiving new scholarly and art-world attention. Williams, the recent Smithsonian fellow, is researching the Wilsons as part of her doctorate at Columbia University. She notes that most enslaved potters wouldn’t have been able to inscribe their names or initials on a pot. But once the Wilson potters were free, they added a maker’s mark, which made all the difference. Future generations were able to dive into the records and find out more about the remarkable potters. “Because we can tie the makers to these objects, which is so rare, it allows us to see the story about the resilience of the Wilson potters during slavery, and their extreme success and survival,” Williams said.
Elmer Joe Brackner Jr. was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Texas when he unearthed buried ceramic shards and located the original kilns at two different H. Wilson & Company sites.
DeSean McClinton-Holland
Ashley Williams, a recent pre-doctoral fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, has been researching the Wilson potters as part of her PhD dissertation on crafts made by enslaved and imprisoned artists.
DeSean McClinton-Holland
The Wilsons’ style may have been influenced by the works coming out of the Edgefield district in South Carolina, a place then known as a kind of pottery Mecca. It was famous for massive, bulbous jars and glazes, features that the early Wilson pots share. Edgefield has its own significant history of highly skilled Black craftsmen, including David Drake, the earliest known enslaved potter to inscribe his work.
CollectorsDeSean McClinton-Holland
Later, the Wilsons’ pottery took on more distinctive features. The men started out using alkaline glaze, but once they opened their own business they switched to salt glaze, likely for its strength and waterproofing properties. Salt glaze also produces more consistent colors and textures, such as the bumpy orange-peel finish admired by H. Wilson & Company collectors. At the time, the method was uncommon in Texas, according to Michelle Johnson, project manager of the William J. Hill Texas Artisans and Artists Archive at the Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, part of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. “And it was dangerous,” she said, because salt glaze produces highly toxic chlorine gas from the wet salt thrown into the kiln during firing.The Wilsons may have learned the technique from Isaac Suttles, an Ohio-born potter known for salt glazing, who is listed in the United States census as living in Seguin at the time.
The Sebastopol House, a Greek Revival home, was built in the 1850s by enslaved laborers who had advanced skills in working with concrete. Today, the building houses the Wilson Pottery Museum.
DeSean McClinton-Holland
Lid rims are another notable element of H. Wilson & Company’s jars. At the first pottery-making site, during their enslavement, the men made more tie-down rims—jars without lids that require paper or cloth as a cover, which were easier and faster to make. Later, at their own shop, they crafted rims fitted for lids. Those lid rims allowed for more watertightstorage, but they also required more sophisticated expertise.If you think you may have stumbled on one of these treasures at a garage or estate sale, look for a horseshoe-like handle—the most significant visual identifier of a Wilson pot. It’s still unclear why Hiram, James and Wallace switched to these thicker, rolled handles from their original Edgefield-inspired crescents. It may have been because horseshoe handles are sturdier, offering more surface connection to the pot’s body. It’s another puzzling question that Williams is pursuing and hopes to answer in the future.
It took a long time for the art world to discover the Wilsons’ creations. After Hiram’s death in 1884, James and Wallace Wilson went on to work at another pottery site run by Marion Durham, a potter from South Carolina who had moved to Texas with John Chandler, who was most likely his enslaved servant at the time. By the time the Wilsons joined them, Durham and Chandler were in business together. That site closed in 1903. These pots remained in circulation, but many details of their story were lost.
Modern replicas of the Wilson pottery logo created by Earline Green.
DeSean McClinton-Holland
Earline Green, an educator and a member of the Wilson Pottery Foundation’s board of directors. Green helps promote the potters’ legacy by demonstrating their innovative 19th-century techniques.
DeSean McClinton-Holland
Decades later, an anthropology graduate student named Elmer Joe Brackner Jr. conducted a magnetometry survey to find buried pottery.At the original Guadalupe Pottery site he found what’s known as a “groundhog kiln,” a uniquely Southern, semi-subterranean kiln used in the 19th century for firing alkaline-glazed pottery. At the second site, home of the independent H. Wilson & Company, Brackner found ceramic-glazed shards and another groundhog kiln. His research, and that of Georgeanna Greer, the ceramic historian, helped piece together the Wilsons’ unusual story. After many years of advocacy by the Wilson Pottery Foundation, art historians and curators began scouring land deeds, court documents and handwritten capacity marksto present a fuller picture of the Wilsons, sometimes correcting previous theories about their methodology and timeline. Texas ceramic artist Earline Green researches the Wilsons’ past while creating her own pottery to honor their legacy. In 2018, she interviewed Wilson descendants and collectors and visited historical societies in Texas for archival information. Two years later, she curated an exhibition on her campus in Fort Worth; the show also displayed ceramic pieces she created based on the work of the Wilson potters.
Deacon Willie Hightower Sr., a descendant of Hiram Wilson and one of the current deacons at Capote Baptist Church.
DeSean McClinton-Holland
Hiram Wilson’sDeSean McClinton-Holland
The narrative continues to evolve, due in no small part to proud descendants of Hiram, James and Wallace. Every three years, hundreds of people gather in Seguin, Texas, for a jubilant three-day Wilson family reunion that is open to the public. In 2023, festivities included the Wilson Pottery Foundation gala and a tenth anniversary celebration at the Wilson Pottery Museum. The last reunion fell on the weekend before Juneteenth, and the reunion committee arranged a kickoff concert Sunday evening followed by Juneteenth events in Seguin’s downtown square.
“I was fortunate to grow up in Texas in the 1980s, around the time when our cousin LaVerne Lewis Britt had uncovered the history,” explains DeSean McClinton-Holland, the photographer of this story and a Wilson descendant through his maternal grandmother. “I grew up knowing bits of the story and visiting the church.” He describes the process of documenting Hiram Wilson’s legacy as a healing journey. “To think, he was born into slavery and was able to accomplish so much shortly thereafter,” he says. “It’s inspiring and motivating to think of all the freedoms we have now, and that we really have to push a bit harder.”
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#three #formerly #enslaved #artists #created
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