Distinguishing Red Eye Gravy from Strawberry or Brown Sugar Glazes

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**There are three glazes that look to me (and lots of others) to be very similar:**

1. Redeye gravy from the J.B. Cole shop in Seagrove, North Carolina
2. Strawberry from Eb Stone's Waco pottery in Kentucky
3. Brown Sugar from the A.R. Cole shop and other art pottery shops in North Carolina (including shops in Sanford, Arden, Seagrove and more), but the A.R Cole shop primarily because of the high temperature firing making things glazes glossier.

I am no expert, but hopefully by the end of this page we will have worked through how us laypersons can tell one from another.

### First and most obvious is by location.

1. If it came from Seagrove, North Carolina, it might be J.B. Cole's Red Eye Gravy glaze (from that shop or a former potter there), but it could still be Brown Sugar. You can see a G.F. Cole glaze (unnamed) that looks a fair amount like redeye gravy on p133 of Lock's "Traditional Potters of Seagrove" but as General Foister Cole was from the A.R. Cole shop I think it's something else, brown sugar maybe? In the Remarkable Potters of Seagrove neither of these glazes are mentioned, but a few glossy similar looking glazes from the JB Cole shop are labeled brown-edged cream glaze; is that a 3rd distinct glaze or is it one of the two we already know about?
2. If a piece came from Kentucky, it should almost certainly be Waco Pottery's Strawberry glaze (the last of this was produced when Eb Stone stopped making pottery in 1943, though he sold his shop and it continued to make tile or some such).
3. If it came from Sanford, North Carolina, it should be A.R. Cole's Brown Sugar glaze (or it may have come from another shop or potter in the same region, as it started as a commercial glaze and was used and reproduced with variations throughout North Carolina art pottery shops ).

This is most likely not useful to you, as you'd like to use the glaze to identify where a found piece of pottery came from. So...

### Second, look at the form (aka shape) of the piece.

1. There is a JB Cole pottery catalog floating around out there as well as a few scanned advertisements and numerous books, none are comprehensive.
2. You can see a variety Waco forms on KOAR, the Kentucky Online Art Resource and in Clear As Mud, the Kentucky Art Pottery book.
3. There are numerous online resources (and people) to help identify JB Cole versus A.R. Cole and other NC pottery shapes, though it can be difficult and uncertain.

Ultimately, you're probably going to end up doing auction searches trying to find a match for your shape, sometimes it works, sometimes you never find a match, sometimes the seller is wrong. Facebook groups tend to be more reliable as they have a sort of built in peer-review process that will often quickly correct any wrong assertions, but again, the posts that have come before you are not comprehensive.

### Third, a pottery collectors and thrifters cliché, look at the bottom.

You can look at the bottom of pottery to identify where the piece came from and return to step 1 for your glaze name, and you are not looking for a label or sticker as most observers might suspect. Sometimes you're looking for a stamp, but usually you are just looking for clues about how it was made, such as clay color, how they glazed it and what they did to it after it was fired.

1. J.B. Cole famously ground off the glaze on the bottom of his pieces, but that's not only not helpful to know here, it can be misleading. Red Eye Gravy pieces have three stilt marks on the bottom forming a triangle and may have grinder marks surrounding them but much of the bottom will be smooth and glassy, still covered with glaze (even the ground parts may just be on the surface and still covered in glaze).
2. If a piece came from Waco it might have ground off glaze like a Cole piece (mostly around the edge but also into the middle), but the bottom will likely otherwise be dry, like a Bybee piece. Waco pieces may have the remnant of an ink stamp with a double circle with some writing between the lines on the top and bottom and in the center. If you could read it, you wouldn't likely be on this page, but the middle bit would read "Waco" OR "Waco Ky" (on two lines) in fairly large type and I believe the top part of the ring would read HAND and the bottom would MADE. It also might say "Mountain Handicraft, WACO, KY" in a recessed 3 line stamp (actually 3 individual 1 line stamps it seems) that was pressed into the clay. An example of a Waco bottom might be a dark red rough bottom with a couple of shiny spots of glaze and either an impressed Mountain Handicraft stamp or an ink Hand Made Waco stamp. Waco bottoms sometimes, but do not always have some smooth glaze spots on the bottom, sometimes you will only see glaze pooled around the edge and there will be no evidence of grinding or wiping. Note that many, but not all of the KOAR listings will have bottom photos and most will be stamped so there's no doubt. Note that sometimes there appear to be stilt marks in a triangle as well. There were at least nine different stamps, until I have a much larger collection to take photos of, you should refer to the photos in the book "Clear as Mud".
3. Pieces from the A.R. Cole shop or other shops that used a Brown Sugar glaze are distinguishable from both of these in a variety of ways that may be too much to go into here.

### Fourth, by the look of the glaze.

These glazes all expressed themselves in huge variety, so this is difficult and somewhat unreliable. Some of each are a bit redder or a bit whiter or a bit browner. They are very organic glazes that depended on the clay, the shape, the firing conditions, the year, probably the potter and a hundred other things. If you google for images of pottery with each of these glaze names, you will find at least dozens of pieces, some of which will be identified correctly (confoundingly, many will not, so exercise your information literacy skills).

1. JB Cole's Red eye gravy has at least a couple of versions, and to add more complications, JB Cole also had a couple versions of the brown sugar glaze.
2. Waco's Strawberry Glaze might look darker and warmer than the other two, the white/cream might be yellower/softer with less contrast, giving the whole piece a darker look than the Cole glaze. The red bits may express themselves more in short straight up and down lines giving the appearance of strawberry seeds. Please keep in mind, every single piece varied, these are not rules. If I understand properly, the Cole glazes are actually a combination of glaze and clay color and the Waco glaze colors actually come from am underglaze and another glaze. Either due to varying kiln conditions or because they actually changed the recipe, the white parts can start at ivory and go to ochre and the red parts can go from orange to a deep mahogany (see the book Clear As Mud for a super detailed description).
3. The North Carolina Brown Sugar glaze (if we can lump them all together) can be distinguished versus the other two because rather than a cream-red glaze it is more of a tan-brown glaze. This is not necessarily a helpful distinction to the ~12 million Americans with red-green color blindness, but maybe asking a friend or using an app can help if the other criteria on this page do not. Note that the J.B. Cole shop also had its own Brown Sugar glaze, a double dip glaze (like the Waco Strawberry glaze). Brown Sugar glazes tended to be matte whereas the other two tended to be glossy, so, as long as you are looking at a piece in front of you and not an online post, that is probably your key identifier. Is it matte and tan to brown but looks otherwise like the other two? It's probably a Brown Sugar glaze. Caveat: A.R. Cole did high fire lead-rutile glazes (such as the Brown Sugar glaze) resulting in a glossy appearance, but I don't think any of those are considered Brown Sugar - I could be wrong.

Note that an expert can often date a piece of pottery based on which version of these glazes was used, due to changes in the industry (such as glaze suppliers going out of business), changes in the law (such as the multiple times US law reduced allowable lead content), or changes at the pottery shops (such as new recipes being developed or kiln changes). That is beyond the scope of this wiki page.

### Fifth, ask an expert.

There are any number of Facebook groups for collecting and sharing, buying and selling, or identifying pottery. I'd guess a new one is made for American pottery at least once per month. The more specific you get, the more helpful and more expert the group experts tend to be.

1. Red eye gravy. You can try the southern pottery groups on Facebook or the post-1975 NC group, but you'll be most well served by the Just North Carolina Pottery up to 1975 group.
2. Strawberry. You can try the southern pottery groups or the Waco/Bybee & Madison County pottery of the past page, but you'll probably be most well served by the Kentucky Art Pottery Collectors group. Apparently, major brands like Niloak and Bauer had glazes that look a fair amount like Strawberry and they'll be able to tell you if something doesn't look Kentucky at all, and will likely be able to confirm if it is.
3. Brown Sugar. You're in luck, because the resources are the same as for red eye gravy.

If there is a better place online to find pottery experts than Facebook groups, I don't know it.

### External Online Resources

You'll see a Brown Sugar glazed piece as well as some Cole forms on this blog post from Jay Henderson: http://pottersforncpc.blogspot.com/2009/10/nc-art-pottery-rebecca-jugs\_8474.html

And Jay Henderson does more of a deep dive into the Brown Sugar glazes used in North Carolina on this blog post: http://pottersforncpc.blogspot.com/2009/09/brown-sugar-art-pottery-glazes.html

A strawberry glaze piece from Waco is in this article https://www.liveauctioneers.com/news/top-news/collectiblesandpopculture/kentuckian-discovers-local-waco-pottery-around-town/

Definitely support Stephen Compton's work by buying one, or maybe all of his books, but on Issuu, which is a legit American website, is a digital version of Stephen Compon's It's Just Dirt for free. It's not the whole book, mind you, but it's quite a lot of it. His publisher has not decided to allow downloads but you can view it on issuu.com https://issuu.com/fonthillmedia/docs/it\_s\_just\_dirt

### Dead Tree References

You can see something like one of these glazes on a Virginia Shelton piece on page 58 of Nancy Sweezy's "Raised in Clay" but the photo is black and white and the particular glaze is not named, just referred to as a fritted earthenware glaze. Opposite this page is a whole diagram and explanation of a fritting furnace; it is mentioned in the various sections on individual potteries if they used fritted glazes, but nothing more specifically relevant.

1. Redeye gravy, as far as I can tell, is not mentioned at all in Charlotte Vestal Brown's "The Remarkable Potters of Seagrove" but there are multiple mentions and photos of a glaze referred to as brown-edged cream that may be it and two pages on the J.B. Cole pottery. In the JB Cole chapter of Stephen Compton's "It's Just Dirt" are a couple of pieces I assume are redeye gravy but they are merely labelled as fritted glaze; redeye gravy is one of the glazes mentioned in the single paragraph on fritted glazes (pp42).
2. Waco's Strawberry glaze is given a full half page in the 12 page Waco Pottery chapter (by Larry G. Hackley) of "Clear as Mud: Early 20th Century Kentucky Art Pottery" (edited by Warren Payne).
3. Brown Sugar glazes may also not be mentioned in "The Remarkable Potters of Seagrove" -- I couldn't find them anyways. Stephen Compton's "It's Just Dirt" doesn't seem to mention them either. As near as I could see there are no red eye gravy or brown sugar glazed items or mentions in Stephen Compton's "North Carolina Pottery: Earthenware, Stoneware and Fancyware". There is information on JB Cole, North State Pottery, Royal Crown and Jugtown glazes on page 393-394 of Charles Zug's "Turners and Burners: The Folk Potters of North Carolina" but I didn't see Redeye gravy or Brown Sugar glazes mentioned at all. Barbara Stone Perry's "North Carolina Pottery: The Collection of the Mint Museums" covers all the right potters, but doesn't seem to cover either Redeye gravy or Brown Sugar glazes at all; someone should maybe donate some to them. There is a "brown over white" glaze developed by Nell Cole Graves on p44 of North Carolina Art Pottery 1900-1960, and there's a fan vase from Seagrove Pottery on p186 but it is not mentioned if either is considered Brown Sugar.