Shearwater Pottery — What Katrina Took

Shearwater Pottery began in 1928, when Peter Anderson built a kiln on the family's land on the Mississippi Sound at Ocean Springs. His brothers Walter and Mac joined within two years. Walter Inglis Anderson became one of the great American painters of the natural world — the man who rowed alone to Horn Island for weeks at a time and once rode out a hurricane lashed to a tree. The compound the family built — nineteen buildings, including a residence and carriage house from the 1830s — was where all of it was made and fired for seventy-seven years.

Hurricane Katrina's surge came twenty-five feet up the Sound on August 29, 2005, and destroyed seventeen of the nineteen buildings. The 1830s residence and the carriage house were gone. Walter Anderson's cottage floated six feet off its foundation and lost its porch, but it held, and it was saved and restored. The family moved the work to a storefront, then came back and rebuilt the kilns. Shearwater still throws pots on the same ground. Most of what stood there does not.