The Makers
Get to know our Artist Family!
Alun Ward
Founder & Owner
The idea that became Blue Ridge Pottery probably started about seventy years ago. As a small child I grasped my mother’s hand and walked across a boggy Welsh pasture to the farm below where we watched farmer Hugh Morgan dip milk from a large frothy tank. He used a brown and worn pottery pitcher and dipped milk into the larger brown jug my mother had carried across the fields.
Pottery was just a part of life in 1940’s Wales; we drank from it, cooked in it and used it to carry our milk home to a tiny cottage in the Welsh Mountains. It was pottery of simple and useful shapes. It was usually brown, and perhaps in concert with the basic “gospel” values of the Welsh Valleys people it was “functional without adornment”.
Over the many years we have been in this location on Golden Horseshoe Road many things have changed. Children have grown up to have children and grandchildren of their own and have come back to help in the family business. We have grown to include much loved son-in-laws and adopted daughters. It is no longer one person but a committed group of artists making a living together and believing in their amazing combined talents. In 1998 we incorporated as Blue Ridge Pottery, Inc. and later enlarged the family ownership of the business.
This is a personal “Thank You” to all those who have supported us and have worked with us over the years and made this “Pottery in the Mountains” dream come true. Remember that Welsh boy that loves the mountains and likes to play in the clay or down at the stream. He’s still around. He may occasionally be sitting at the wheel making pots but look for him in the garden. He’s the one that’s all dirty, with one or two grand-daughters at his side, planting flowers and playing in the dirt.
Norma J. Caron-Ward
Owner & Artist
They say Home is where the Heart is. As a military dependent, I spent a lot of time moving about the country; Hawaii as a young child and all the compass points on the North American continent until we all “retired”. Except for Hawaii, I never found another “Heart Home” until I started traveling through the mountain valley where I now live. For years I passed my favorite spots along Route 33….the Pottery shop in an old historic Stage Coach Inn, a mountain hill farm surrounded by ponds of peaceful beauty, and an antiques shop across the highway from what would be the road to where I now live.
My “Heart” was always torn between my love of art (and the ways it helps to grow us through exploration and beauty) and my need to make a “living”. My dream continued to be to make art, create spaces, and to illustrate books for children with my water colored drawings, while working with a community of artists in a healthy and functional way. Of course, doing so while fulfilling my needs financially as well.
Twenty five years later my Home is where my Heart is. That potter is my husband, those artists are our “family”, and we all use our skills as artists to make our living. Our way of life allows us to walk our values, to share and to explore ways of functioning as whole human beings.
We enjoy sharing that way of life with all of you who visit our shop, celebrate weddings at the Golden Horseshoe Inn, refresh your spirits at Chestnut Hills Cottage or just come to this valley because it warms your heart and makes you feel at “Home” too. We’ll look forward to sharing some time with you in a really heartfelt way.
