HYDE PARK, Vt. (WCAX) – Along the side of Vermont Route 15 in Underhill sits a sign reading “George Scatchard Pottery.” Having driven by for years, we reached out about the possibility of featuring his work on Made in Vermont. Unfortunately, we learned the artist, famous for his stoneware lamps, passed away in November 2023.
However, the legacy of his lamps lives on in Hyde Park. Though he no longer makes them himself, new George Scatchard Lamps are being made every day.
“All of George’s clay, his designs, his recipes,” explained Steve Miller, with a certain sense of pride. Miller is a longtime employee of House of Troy, the Hyde Park business that bought the rights to G. Scatchard Lamps in 2012. It was then that Miller started shadowing the maker himself.
“It was a big thrill to get to learn from George,” Miller reflected. “I had a great opportunity to learn from a master that knew quite a lot.”
For Miller and the small team carrying on Scatchard’s legacy, these products are a point of pride.
“His lamps will last for thousands of years, especially because they’re made from stone once they’re fired and come out of the kiln,” he said.
The process begins with bags of clay. Miller’s team burns through about 450 pounds per week, adding water to make something called a slip. Once filtered, the slip is hosed into molds, where time proves to be tricky.
“So, if we pour 56 or 58 lamps in a day, we have to plan on trimming that many the next day,” Miller explained.
When they have a cast, the molds are trimmed, dried and glazed.
“They’re all hand glazed by a brush and a syringe and because of that, each lamp has its own swirls, its own colors in it, its own– if you would– flavor to it,” Miller said. “There’s almost an impossibility that each lamp would come out exactly the same.”
Once they have their color, they go into a reduction kiln for 18 hours at 2,300 degrees.
“It takes it 22 hours to cool down before we can open the door to be able to handle the lamps and remove them,” said Miller.
What comes out of the kiln is often entirely different than what goes in. The chemistry of the colors is something Scatchard perfected himself, and this team does not stray from the recipe. With 28 colors and 38 models, the only thing that’s changed over the years is the number of lamps this team turns out.
“Our volume has gone from around 4,500 when we first started working for George,” said Miller. ‘We’re over 6,000 lamps at this point.”
The assembly team installs the rest of the parts and pieces on the lamps to be sold across the U.S. and Canada. As they work to carry on Scatchard’s legacy, the care and attention of this team is second to none.
“Love doing George’s lamps, have told him from the beginning I hope I can always continue to do his lamps for as long as I possibly can,” Miller said.