Pottery

Lee County clay deposits provided the basis for another small but high-profile industry during the 1920s and 1930s, when local entrepreneurs established art potteries. Tourists rather than farmwives provided the market for Lee County's twentieth-century potters. The first of the new potteries was the brainchild of Rebecca Palmer Cooper, a hobbyist who in 1924 established the North State Pottery at her farm near Carbonton. The Coopers constructed a rustic log sales cabin to retail their wares to local customers, tourists, and the "winter sojourners of Southern Pines and Pinehurst". By 1925, the pottery produced 350 different designs.

The county gained a second art pottery in 1928 with the establishment of the Rainbow Pottery. In 1936, Rainbow was apparently owned by M. S. Leverett, whose potters produced wares of "ancient classical origin" using a "scientific process of glazing and burning." Randolph County native Arthur Ray Cole came to Lee County to work for Leverett, but he soon established his own pottery on US 1 north of Sanford. In 1939, the A. R. Cole Pottery produced seven hundred pieces a week; most were shipped to Florida and to northern markets, but some were sold to the tourists who passed by the pottery on their springtime return trips from Florida. Descendants of A. R. Cole continue to operate the Cole Pottery near its original location.