Advertisement

2 days ago | Advertorial | Marcy Ellenwood

“I’ve said it at my table for 37 years: your olive oil isn’t bad. Your bottle is.” — Why a 72-year-old potter from Seagrove is selling her last 216 hand-glazed oil dispensers at a special price, before her barn closes for good.

Lavonne Hartsell can tell within ten seconds whether somebody is going to take one of her oil dispensers home. They pull the cork, sniff the empty dispenser, and then they say it: “My olive oil always tastes stale by the end.”

Lavonne just nods. “That’s because it’s been sitting in the sun,” she tells them. She has been saying it at her table at the pottery festival every November since 1989.

Lavonne is 72. For more than forty years she has thrown and glazed pots in an old tobacco barn behind her farmhouse, at the end of a gravel road outside Seagrove, a town of barely 250 people and close to a hundred potteries. This October she fired her kiln for the last time.

The Sunday the salad tasted like cardboard

Seagrove has been a pottery town since the 1700s, when families dug red clay out of their own fields and fired jugs for whiskey and molasses. Lavonne grew up three miles down the road. In 1971, at seventeen, she took a job wedging clay and loading kilns for one of the old pottery families, and she stayed fourteen years.

Her husband Royce grows tomatoes. Every summer Sunday he made the same thing: thick slices from the garden, salt, pepper and olive oil from a tall clear bottle that stood on the windowsill above the sink, right where the afternoon sun hit it.

One Sunday in July 1989 he took a bite and put his fork down. “This tastes like a cardboard box,” he said. The bottle was barely six weeks old. That same evening he reached past it for the pepper, knocked it into the sink, and it broke in three pieces.

The tobacco barn at the end of the gravel road

In 1985 Lavonne bought a used wheel and a small kiln and moved them into the tobacco barn behind the house. For the first few years she made mugs and pie plates for the festival and the church Christmas sale.

After 1989, people started asking for “one like Royce’s.” She figures she has made around 5,200 since. Each one takes about three hours of work spread over ten days: throwing the cylinder, pressing the dimples into the wet clay with her thumbs, pulling the little handle, pinching the lip, drying, the first firing, dipping the top in glaze and the second firing, when the glaze runs down on its own. Then she presses a cork into every neck by hand and fills each dispenser with water over the sink to check that it pours clean.

What’s wrong with the bottle you’re using now

After 37 years at her festival table, Lavonne has heard every complaint there is about oil bottles. They come down to five:

1. 1The sun gets in. Clear glass lets the light straight through to the oil. A few weeks by the window, and good oil turns flat and stale. Royce called it cardboard.
2. 2It’s too tall to trust. Tall, skinny bottles are top-heavy. One sleeve, one elbow, and the stove is swimming in oil.
3. 3It leaves a sticky ring. The last drop always ends up running down the outside and onto the counter, where crumbs and dust stick to it.
4. 4It’s wide open. A pour spout with no cap lets in dust, kitchen grease and, every summer, gnats.
5. 5It hides in the pantry. Plastic bottles are too ugly to leave out. So the oil goes behind a door, and you reach for the butter instead.

What 37 years taught her about an oil dispenser

Each of those five problems is the reason her dispensers look the way they do. And the first thing people write after theirs arrives is almost always the same: “It’s heavier than I expected.” That’s on purpose.

“The Thick Clay Body”: Thick, fired clay, glazed all the way around. No light gets through to the oil, so it can stay out on the counter right where you cook.

“The Short, Flat Base”: About 6 inches tall and just over 3 inches wide, with the weight down low on a flat bottom. “Royce has bumped it with his elbow for thirty-seven years,” Lavonne says. “It rocks and sits right back down.”

“The Pulled Handle and Pinched Lip”: A small loop pulled by hand from the same clay, just right for one finger, and a lip she pinches into shape while the clay is still soft. The oil comes out in a thin, steady pour instead of a glug.

“The Real Cork”: A natural cork closes the neck after every use, so dust, grease and gnats stay out. Each dispenser holds about 13.5 fl oz (400 ml).

Four glazes, and she never knows exactly how they’ll run

Lavonne dips only the top of each dispenser. In the kiln, at around 2,300 degrees, the glaze melts and runs down the sides on its own, so no two dispensers ever come out the same.

Uwharrie Blue is the river at the bottom of the hill on a clear day. Sandhill Peach is for the orchards down toward Candor, where her mother picked every June. Wood Ash is the quietest of the four, mixed with ash from their own woodstove. And Muscadine is the deep purple of the wild grapes along the fence behind the barn.

The morning her shoulder said enough

What Lavonne will miss most are the early mornings: coffee in the barn, fog lying low over the fields, the first ball of clay on the wheel.

Centering clay takes your whole body, leaned in through the right shoulder. Last spring that shoulder started to hurt every single time. The doctor called it arthritis and said it would not get better.

In October she loaded the kiln one last time. There is nobody to take the barn over. 216 oil dispensers are left, 54 in each glaze. In early December she closes the barn for good, and the wheel goes to the art room at the county high school. Orders will keep going out after that, until the last dispenser is gone.

“An oil dispenser belongs by the stove, not in a china cabinet”

Hand-thrown, hand-glazed oil dispensers like these sell for $95 to $140 in craft galleries in Asheville and Charleston. For her last 216, Lavonne could ask that much, and nobody would blame her. She won’t.

She’s asking far less. She wants her last dispensers on real counters this Thanksgiving and Christmas, next to real stoves, getting used every day.

Lavonne doesn’t use a computer. Her granddaughter Kenley, 24, a dental hygienist in Asheboro, saw the full shelves after Sunday dinner. “Grandma, you’ll never get 216 oil dispensers onto one festival table,” she said, and spent the next weekend building the page where you can order one now.

What home cooks say about Lavonne’s oil dispensers

Three questions people ask before ordering

Where can I buy one of Lavonne’s oil dispensers?

Only through this page. Lavonne’s dispensers are not sold on Amazon, Temu or in any store.

How long will they be available?

Only while stocks last. The kiln has been fired for the last time, and there are 216 oil dispensers left across all four glazes. Once a glaze is gone, it’s gone for good.

What if it’s not right for me?

You have 90 days to try it at home. If you’re not happy, just send a short email and you’ll get your money back. No questions, no hassle.

More from kitchens with one by the stove