55 years of pottery making and clay supply at Sheffield Pottery

By Kate Abbott12:00AM / Friday, June 06, 2003Print Story | Email Story

John Cowen, president of Sheffield Pottery, has taken a local retail business and expanded it into a supplier of clay and ceramic appliances, trucking from Florida to Ohio. He has been president 21 years. In that time, he has expanded the potteryâ€™s warehouse space and clay-making business; he has expanded the retail pottery business by buying back pottery from customers that buy his clay; and he has introduced equipment for manufacturing, refining and shipping his clays that few if any clay manufacturers in the country can rival. Johnâ€™s parents founded Sheffield Pottery and his father, Joseph, ran it from 1946 to 1982. His parents bought a farm in Sheffield in 1943 that happened to have clay deposits. They began to mine the local clay, and made and sold their own pottery from their road-side produce stand. Within three years, they gave up their farm animals, and concentrated on clay. The Cowens sold their own pottery in what is now the pottery retail barn until the â€˜60s. They bought out the nearby Torrington Pottery, which gave them the equipment to make clay on a larger scale. They got into selling clay by request, John said, through inquiries from local schools and places like Sturbridge, who wanted to use local clay. Joseph promoted his pottery business until the 1970s. Then his wife got cancer. John said his father lost interest in the pottery business he and his wife had built, and began concentrating on retirement property. John worked for him off and on for years. After he graduated college, he took over the pottery, in 1982. It was a small company then, John said, about three men and three women. It was also a tumultuous time for him. He lost his mother and he got married in 1983. (He now has four daughters, ages six, eight, 15 and 16. His father is fine: still involved in Florida real estate at the age of 82.) When he took charge, John realized his bent lay more with industrial supply than with making pottery to sell. He had education in business administration and accounting, and he did not, he said, have his motherâ€™s artistic genes. He began to expand the supply side of the business. He built a warehouse in 1983 and hired a ceramics engineer to teach him the business. Cowen developed stock clay and a catalog: the catalog now spans 150 pages, with products and information, and a dictionary of terms. Some college professors require their students to have a copy of the catalog, he said, in ceramics classes. Graduate students who want to make a living with ceramics will have to deal with clay suppliers. More recently, Cowen has developed a new e-commerce website, where people can order clay and supplies online. It has taken two years to build, he said. It was a struggle at first to keep the business growing, Cowen said. His father had neglected the pottery business since 1970. It ran on old equipment, but it had great credit and a great reputation. He updated and expanded his equipment, clay formulas and clays through the 1980s. In the early 1990s, he was getting a third of a gallon per minute from his well, and had to import water; he dug a new well in 1992. This period of new customers and expansions in Sheffield Pottery coincided with one of the potteryâ€™s largest competitors going out of business. The competitor served potters in Massachusetts and other New England States and the mid-Atlantic. Cowen bought up this companyâ€™s stock, and when the company folded, it sent enquiries to the Sheffield Pottery. Cowen said the Sheffield Pottery barely got by through the â€˜90s, but he doubled his 1992 expansion in 2001. He moved all of his manufacturing equipment to the Sheffield Potteryâ€™s plant. The retail barn, he split into two sections. It is a beautiful post and beam building, he said, filled with handmade pottery of all kinds. Cowen did not want to lose the retail side of the business, he said. Sheffield Pottery buys pottery back from customers who buy clay from them. The pottery carries dozens of lines of ceramics from all over New England, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and into North Carolina. Cowen is working on getting more lines. From some potters, he said, they buy more pottery than they sell in clay. The retail barn does not sell anything but pottery. â€œPottery is well known to be the least expensive of artistic mediums,â€ Cowen said: â€œYou can get beautiful, handmade pottery for one tenth the price of a painting . . . This is not Manhattan. Weâ€™re sticking with our country roots. Itâ€™s great to dig up your backyard one scoop at a time, as long as itâ€™s a big back yard.â€ Sheffield Pottery does not make much of its own pottery to sell, these days. Cowen said he left that to his customers: â€œthey make nicer pottery; I make nicer clay.â€ The Sheffield Pottery does still make one kind of pottery to sell though: personalized and commemorative pottery, for a a childâ€™s birth or a townâ€™s 200th anniversary. Cowenâ€™s wife runs the retail business. In the other half of the retail barn, Cowen offers clay tools and supplies. His ceramics equipment showroom has been ranked among the finest, he said, for variety and quality of supplies: wheels, glazes, tools, kilns and other equipment displayed Home Depot style. â€œYou have to go to Ohio to find a company close to this size,â€ he said. For clay of the same variety and quality, â€œyou would have to go to California.â€ Cowen said he talked to clay miners and sales representatives who had been to every mine and distributor in the country. They have told him his is the third largest. Besides expanding his storage, retail and manufacturing space, Cowen has invested in rare state-of-the-art equipment. He has new trucks for delivering his clay, new refining equipment, and a one of a kind computerized batching system that regulates the making of different clays. Like his father, he has taught himself a lot about the business, he said. It took a year to work the bugs out of the batching system. Sheffield Potteryâ€™s native clay makes a part of most of the clays they sell. The pottery sells Sheffield clay and other clays they make. They are the only distributor in New England, at least, that has its own mine. There are generally six to eight ingredients in any clay, Cowen said. Different clays have different colors: red, grey, white. Sheffield Pottery sells a clay reinforced with grog (fine grit) for large sculpture, clay for coarse dark tile, terra cotta, clay for white bone china; they have the equipment to make all of those. Sheffield clay is blue grey, but fires red. Cowen said the pottery buys more clay than they mine. They mix their own clay and other clays with various fluxes and fillers. His newest, and for the time being, his last major piece of equipment, has been a raw materials processing system which will allow him to refine his clay beyond what any of his competitors can do. Clay, once mined, is dried, sifted and mixed to remove impurities and create clay bodies of different colors and grain. Cowenâ€™s refining system screens clays through a range of meshes to produce clays of varying fineness. It is state-of-the-art equipment unheard of in this country, he said. This refining system can screen clay through 30, 40, 50, 80 and 100 mesh clays. It has a dual screen mechanism and an iron filter. Clay is made in huge grinders, Cowen explained. Grinders wear down; screening at 30 mesh â€” the standard mesh, about half the size of a window screen â€” can still leave bits of iron in the clay. â€œNo one has interchangeable meshes or goes up to 100,â€ Cowen said; â€œI only know two that had meshes [as fine as] 40.â€ Some people want coarser clay for larger pieces or higher pieces thrown on a wheel, Cowen said. White stoneware has no grog, no specks of iron, no impurities. Sheffield Pottery supplies Simon Pierce Pottery with a pure white reduction fired clay; perfecting that clay was one of the reasons they pursued this refining system, Cowen said. Cowenâ€™s delivery trucks are also custom built. Clay is heavy and inexpensive, he said, so the process of shipping it has to be efficient and economical. His trucks cost him $130,000 each, but one man can take a palette of clay weighing 4000 lb. off a truck with one thumb. The loading palettes operate on a crank system â€” very safe and efficient. Sheffield Pottery is ICC licensed. Cowen said they haul open market freight so their trucks do not run empty. They might, for instance, deliver a load of processed clay to Ohio and bring a load of rough clay back from the mines there. They ship clay as far west as Ohio, he said, and haul in from as far as Missouri. To the south, they ship as far as North Carolina, and haul in from Florida. They send a load a week to Tennessee and Georgia, he said. The pottery has a more concentrated market, closer to home. They supply schools, hobbyists, construction companies and manufacturers with clay and supplies. They sell most of their mined clay for construction, Cowen said, to build dams, line ponds, floor riding arenas and stalls and baseball diamonds, and repair environmental structures.

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McCann Recognizes Superintendent Award Recipient

By Tammy DanielsiBerkshires Staff
05:32PM / Tuesday, December 23, 2025

Landon LeClair and Superintendent James Brosnan with Landon's parents Eric and Susan LeClair, who is a teacher at McCann.

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — The Superintendent's Award has been presented to Landon LeClair, a senior in McCann Technical School's advanced manufacturing course.

The presentation was made last Thursday by Superintendent Jame Brosnan after Principal Justin Kratz read from teachers' letters extolling LeClair's school work, leadership and dedication.

"He's become somewhat legendary at the Fall State Leadership Conference for trying to be a leader at his dinner table, getting an entire plate of cookies for him and all his friends," read Kratz to chuckles from the School Committee. "Landon was always a dedicated student and a quiet leader who cared about mastering the content."

LeClair was also recognized for his participation on the school's golf team and for mentoring younger teammates.

"Landon jumped in tutoring the student so thoroughly that the freshman was able to demonstrate proficiency on an assessment despite the missed class time for golf matches," read Kratz.

The principal noted that the school also received feedback from LeClair's co-op employer, who rated him with all fours.

"This week, we sent Landon to our other machine shop to help load and run parts in the CNC mill," his employer wrote to the school. LeClair was so competent the supervisor advised the central shop might not get him back.

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