David Drake

David Drake, also known as Dave Pottery and Dave the Potter, was an American potter who lived from around 1800 to the 1870s in Edgefield, South Carolina. He was enslaved for most of his life and became free only at the end of the American Civil War. Between the 1820s and the 1870s he produced alkaline-glazed stoneware jugs, often signing his work Dave, and he is recognized as the first enslaved potter known to have inscribed his own work; he inscribed his pieces with poetry, often in rhyming couplets, alongside his signature, a striking act given that anti-literacy laws had left most enslaved people illiterate.