McDade Pottery

Before refrigeration, a household in this country kept its food alive inside fired clay, and for half a century a good deal of that clay came from McDade. The works descended from a jug shop started in 1853 near what is now Bastrop State Park, which moved to McDade in the late 1870s to be nearer better clay. The deposits that mattered lay along Marshy Branch, four miles east of town. Robert L. Williams, who knew ceramics, bought out the remaining interest in 1890 and built a new plant covering three acres, with two brick beehive kilns, clay grinding machinery and its own railroad siding. On the twenty sixth of January 1893 he threw the first piece of ware in it himself, and the plant ran for the next half century. What came out were jugs, churns, crocks, pitchers and bowls, the plain equipment of keeping milk, butter, kraut and salt pork edible through a Texas summer. Williams was an inventor as well as a potter: he patented an extrusion press with interchangeable dies in July 1909, which let the plant turn out flowerpots and hollowware at speed rather than one piece at a time on a wheel. He died in 1923. His son, Albert Payne Williams senior, kept the pottery running on a reduced scale until 1942, by which time domestic refrigeration had removed most of the reason anybody needed a churn. The site was dismantled in 1959. The clay is still under the ground east of town. The kilns are not.