Charles Gordon Zug III—Terry, as he told us to call him—and I drove off together from Chapel Hill on a fall day in 1968. He had recently come to the University of North Carolina with a PhD in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania to teach in our Department of English and Curriculum in Folklore. This trip was his first venture into the wilds of Piedmont, North Carolina. Our goal was to attend a small fiddle convention 60 miles southwest of Chapel Hill, and the shortest route was by back roads that passed several pottery workshops. We had plenty of time and could stop at each one, so we did. Neither of us realized till later that this experience would launch the trajectory of a lifetime of his work.This was not because Terry lacked other rich experiences. Born 30 years earlier on February 26, 1938, he spent the winters of his boyhood in western Pennsylvania, where his family, until bought out, had owned the Zug Iron and Steel Company. Terry spent his summers on Mason's Island, Connecticut, where he loved to fish and swim. Phillips Academy Andover was his high school. His university was Yale. There, he majored in engineering—and played varsity sports. By the time he graduated in 1959, however, he felt dissatisfied with engineering, so he enlisted in the Navy. He completed the Navy Officer Candidate School and then the Mine Warfare School. In 1960, he began serving on minesweepers in the Pacific. He was based in Sasebo, Japan, so he learned conversational Japanese and explored southern Japan on a motorbike. He always kept a strong interest in Japanese culture, especially in its woodblock prints. In 1963, Terry left the Navy but continued for years to serve in the naval reserve, retiring as a Lieutenant Commander. For a career, he next explored English literature in the master's program at the University of Pittsburgh. Finally, he gravitated to the doctoral program in folklore at the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote his dissertation on Sir Walter Scott and balladry. He continued long relationships with three of his classmates: Archie Green, John Burrison, and Henry Glassie.At the University of North Carolina (UNC), Terry taught English courses, but he was here to strengthen the Curriculum in Folklore, one of the few interdisciplinary programs in the university in those years. Visits from Archie Green helped us gain support for the Southern Folklife Collection, now a major component in our Special Collections Library. Terry taught “Introduction to Folklore” and other courses on material culture and folk narrative. Later in his career, he co-edited the book Arts in Earnest: North Carolina Folklife (Duke University Press, 1990), which contained eight essays by his students on subjects like legends and Jack tales, decoy carvings and quilts, tobacco chants and auctioneering, and folk plays and industrial pranks. In 1974, a lecture at UNC by John Burrison on the traditional pottery of Alabama made Terry suddenly aware of the complexity and distinctiveness of the North Carolina pottery scene. Terry plunged into an energetic study on the topic.In 1984, the University of North Carolina Press published the results, Turners and Burners: The Folk Potters of North Carolina, a hefty 500-page book with hundreds of diagrams and photographs, with a sizeable section even in color. Because library research turned up little of value, Terry went to potters—and not just in the Jugtown-Seagrove area. He extended his search and found six pottery-making centers in the state. Until then, only the early Moravians of Forsythe County had received much attention. Terry interviewed many potters and people whose families had thrown pots, gathered names and genealogies, searched census records, and explored early kiln sites. He compiled names of at least 500 potters who had worked in the state, identified styles of many early potters, and photographed their work.He found a major folk potter, Burlon Craig in the Catawba Valley, whom he interviewed and photographed, documenting every step of his work and his commentaries. Terry recognized that changes in the rural culture had wiped out the need for utilitarian pottery and, hence, for the occupation of potters. In his writing, he tried to situate all potters in their own worlds. He became fascinated by how younger potters developed new uses and forms. Potters now abounded again in the state. His authoritative book won the Chicago Folklore Prize in 1988 and, within North Carolina, the 1987 Mayflower Cup for Nonfiction from the Society of Mayflower Descendants and the 1987 President's Award from the North Carolina Society of Historians.Terry Zug found his greatest professional satisfaction, however, in what he had done and would continue to do for the pottery community. He tirelessly promoted appreciation of the North Carolina pottery traditions. He organized exhibitions across the state and helped others to do so. Each exhibition catalog held a new essay by Terry—at least nine of them over the years. A local “citizens’ committee” in Hickory established an annual pottery festival for the Catawba Valley, which Terry always supported, often attending with Henry Glassie and Pravina Shukla. He was also a leader in a citizens’ committee that enlisted the help of George Holt of the North Carolina Arts Council to design, fund, construct, and staff the North Carolina Pottery Center in Seagrove, which serves not only 100 local potters but also 1,000 active potters in the state. For all of this, the Governor of North Carolina in 2000 awarded Terry the prestigious Order of the Long Leaf Pine for 30 years of extraordinary service to the state. Terry died on January 19, 2025. Fittingly, the Pottery Center was the place chosen for a Memorial on May 18, 2025. There, Terry's friends in the pottery and folklore communities joined his wife Daphne Cruze-Zug and their families in celebrating his life and his work.
Daniel W. Patterson (Thu,) studied this question.