Pewabic Pottery and Mary Chase Perry Stratton

The building on East Jefferson Avenue has been making ceramic tile since nineteen oh three. Mary Chase Perry was in her mid-thirties when she co-founded Pewabic Pottery with Horace Caulkins, whose ceramic kiln she had been using to fire china-painting work. She had trained as a painter. What she found in the ceramic process was something that absorbed the rest of her life.

Perry developed a distinctive iridescent glaze she could not fully explain and could not exactly replicate from batch to batch. The variation became part of the aesthetic. She called it the Pewabic glaze, after an Ojibwe word for metal, taken from the Pewabic copper mine in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The tiles she produced went into major buildings: the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Guardian Building in Detroit, and dozens of public and private commissions across the country.

She married William Buck Stratton in nineteen eighteen, at fifty-one, having run the pottery largely independently for fifteen years. She continued running it after the marriage. She continued after her husband died. She continued past her eightieth birthday. Mary Chase Perry Stratton died in nineteen sixty-one at the age of ninety-four. She had been making pots and tiles for fifty-eight years.

Pewabic Pottery still operates on East Jefferson Avenue. It is a working ceramic studio, an educational program, a museum, and a production facility for architectural tile. The iridescent glaze she could not fully explain is still being produced by the people who followed her.