The MakersofFredericksburg

Two brothers-in-arms of the family kind — Simon Ulman and his brother Jerome — opened the shop in April of 1928. It has not moved since. Jerome's son Jerry runs it now with his wife Donna, which makes this the same family at the same address for ninety-eight years.

Repair, custom design, appraisal and restyling are all carried out on site — a quiet and increasingly unusual sentence. It means that when something is mended, it is mended here, by somebody in this building, rather than posted to a workshop in another state.

A jeweler's bench is the oldest arrangement in the trade: a half-moon cut from a slab, a leather catch slung beneath it to gather what falls, and a person leaning into a small pool of light. Whatever else has changed on Caroline Street since 1928, that bench has not.

A potter named Dan Finnegan started it. He had been working in Fredericksburg since 1980, out of a shop and studio on Hanover Street, taking on students largely to pay his apprentices. As the students multiplied he needed room, and found twelve thousand square feet of it in the old plumbing-supply storehouse behind Fredericksburg Hardware.

No bank would lend on it. Twenty-three friends and fellow artists put up the money instead. Finnegan spent two and a half years fitting the building out piece by piece, and roughly fifty artists moved in behind him. Five hundred people walked through the door on the first day.

He had seen the Torpedo Factory up in Alexandria and borrowed the shape of it, but not the co-op structure — he wanted a place where everyone had a voice rather than a vote. Of the whole enterprise he has said only: “I had only intended to open a pottery school.”

Since 2013 it has belonged to D.D. and Kenneth Lecky, a potter and a photographer. Sixty artists work there now, with fourteen staff, in clay and watercolour and metalwork and — genuinely — clockmaking. D.D. Lecky calls it a “choose-your-own-adventure art place.” She also says failure is part of creativity, and that the point is to teach children to enjoy making rather than to chase a product.

Neal Reed has been there since the first day and runs the pottery studio, turning functional work — bowls, plates, the things that get used. On what it became, he is brief: “there’s a sense of community. That’s the best part.”

Bill Harris was there from the beginning too, an oil painter who moved to the area in 1996 and had decided by 1998 that this was the town to be an artist in. He has made his living from it since — paintings, commissions, and teaching other people to paint.

Trista Chapman has been throwing pots at 1104 Sophia Street since the 1980s, and making them for more than thirty years. She learned as a girl in New York, where her parents ran a Freedom School. Her work goes out under the name Tristaware, and it is not a restrained palette.

The building became something larger than one potter's studio after 2008, when her husband died of ALS. She opened the place to other artists, turned the front into a shop, and let the basement to a paint-your-own-pottery outfit. What is there now — pottery, stained glass, jewelry, metalwork — is the result of that decision.

Gabriel and Scarlett Pons opened PONSHOP on Caroline Street in 2010, after a four-year studio residency at LibertyTown — which makes this the second entry on this page that Dan Finnegan's building set in motion. Places that teach their craft are how a trade survives a generation; this is what that looks like in practice.

Scarlett is a self-taught potter with a degree in architecture. Gabriel has been drawing, designing and skateboarding since he was thirteen. The front of the shop is a gallery carrying their own work alongside some thirty other makers, and they teach — ceramics, jewelry design, drawing, painting. Their stated premise is that creativity builds community.

John and Kathryne Mitchell opened the Made In Virginia Store at 920 Caroline in 1986, on the conviction that the Commonwealth was full of good things almost nobody outside it had heard of. John had spent thirteen years as a wine merchant first — a useful apprenticeship for the job he then gave himself, which was to drive around the state finding the best of what it made.

It is the retail end of a great many benches, wheels and looms.