Dave the Potter, his descendants, and the long unfinished business of American justice — told through the book The Concatenation, the newspapers that documented a system of terror, and the records that carried one family across two centuries.
There is a jar in a museum in San Francisco. It is large, alkaline-glazed, its surface shimmering with the olive-green patina of fired wood ash and local clay. On its shoulder, pressed into the wet clay before it hardened — before it was fed into the kiln's fire, before it became permanent — there are two words and a date.
The man who made that jar was not supposed to know what that word meant. He was not supposed to know any words at all. In 1834, the state of South Carolina had made it a criminal offense to teach him to read or write. But Dave knew what concatenation meant: a chain of linked events, each link forged by what came before, each link making inevitable what comes after.
He pressed it into the clay, and he slid the jar into the fire, and he waited.
He was waiting for us.
Also in the chain: Emma (Jones) Long, born 1865 — Caroline's daughter, Dave's granddaughter — who died in November 1926, the same violent month the NAACP walked the streets of Aiken County investigating the Lowman lynchings.
Scholars had written books about “Dave the Potter.” Museums had catalogued his jars. And yet his own descendants did not know he was theirs until 2016. That is not a paradox. It is the design of the world documented on this site, working exactly as intended.
The stories were dangerous to tell. The family lived through Bloody Edgefield — Hamburg and Ellenton in 1876, the Red Shirt campaigns, lynch law reported in the county press as ordinary news, and finally the Lowman lynchings of 1926. In a world where a Black family’s visibility could be fatal, remembering out loud was a risk. The generations who lived it protected their children with silence.
The family broke apart. After Pierce, the family’s patriarch was his son Willie B. Jones — and Willie B. left. He died in New York in 1926, the same terrible year Emma Long died at home in Aiken County. The household that might have carried the potter’s memory forward lost its center, and the children scattered north in the Great Migration.
They never went back. When the family left Edgefield and Aiken, they did not look back — and the generations that followed never returned. The place-names, the church, the graves, the neighbors who remembered a turner named Dave: every thread that connects a family to its past stayed behind in a county they had every reason to avoid. What survived was only a fragment — there had been a potter — with no name, no dates, and no county attached.
That is why it took the records — the censuses, the death certificates, the estate files, and finally DNA — to restore what terror had taken. The family did not forget Dave. The world they survived made remembering impossible, and in 2016 the documents finally said what the silence could not.
The 1818 mortgage that priced a seventeen-year-old boy at $400. The Rev. John Landrum estate file of 1847 where Dave was found listed among the property. The poems he fired into permanence.
From the 1870 census that reunites Dave with his daughter Caroline, to the 1950 census that finds Daisy in Washington, D.C. — the family's record, set against the terror unfolding around them.
Hamburg. Ellenton. The Red Shirts. Lynch law in Edgefield. The Lowman lynchings. The massacres described in The Concatenation — and the newspapers that made massacre sound like civilization.
Willie B. Jones and the chain gang. Emma Long's death in the terrible November of 1926. And the open question no record has yet answered: what became of the property Pierce Jones held?
About The Concatenation, and the genealogical research — Dave the Turner — that proves the family's descent from Dave and traces his jars across the American museum system.
Approximately 40 to 45 of Dave's inscribed jars are known to survive, scattered across the American museum system. In August 2021, one of his large, four-handled poem jars — featuring the inscription “A very Large Jar which has 4 handles / pack it full of fresh meats- then light candles” — sold at auction for $1,560,000. According to Crocker Farm Stoneware Auction, this remains the record price for any American stoneware vessel sold at auction [source]. The man who made it was mortgaged for $400 in 1818.
For two hundred years, the man who wrote those words was known to the world as “Dave the Potter” — while his own descendants, scattered by the terror documented in these pages, did not know he was theirs. This site explains how that happened, and how the records finally answered his question.
Here. Here is your relation. Two centuries later, the descendants have returned — standing before the jars, reading his handwriting, and asking, with the patience of people who have been asking for a very long time, for what belongs to them.