Phoenix is no stranger to dubious honors. About 100 years ago, before we were famous for our seemingly endless streaks of hundred-degree days or skyrocketing housing costs, the city was known as the last bastion of hope for tuberculosis patients.
In the 1930s, scores of people battling the disease flocked to the Valley, where the climate was believed to provide relief from TB’s debilitating symptoms. Wealthy patients were treated in clinics, but many found refuge in a series of religious missions.
The missions couldn’t offer much in the way of formal medical procedures, but they did their best to make so-called "lungers" comfortable, or at least distract them from their illness.
One of these missions was in Sunnyslope. Ed Dobbins, a Phoenix history buff, says the so-called Desert Mission also played an unlikely role in the history of ceramics.
Conversation highlights
DOBBINS: The minister who who ran the mission, Joseph Hillhouse, he was always out raising funds and finding things for people to do. He didn't want him sitting around all day. And one year he stopped in Hollister, Missouri. And that's where he saw this guy, Harold Horine, selling pottery along along the roadside, the very colorful pottery. And he talked to him and he found out, you know how it was made and he found out that Horine was actually would go out to ... teach people how to make the pottery and sell them like a turnkey operation. So Hillhouse thought this would be a good thing for the people in Sunnyslope. And he asked Horine if he would come out and show him how it's done.
And you say it was this turnkey operation. What was, what was specific about this particular way of making pots?
DOBBINS: Well, first of all, it was not made of pottery, it was made out of from cement. But he didn't use any molds. Most pottery would be made out of cement, would have been used molds where you break open the two halves.
So he patented a process that it was generally built on a wheel — like a potter's wheel but without, without the foot pedal. He would start with a pile of wet sawdust covered with cheese cloth. And put that on the wheel, and then cover that over with a thick layer of concrete. And then turn the wheel while he had a template that he would press against the concrete to get rid of the excess concrete to shape the outside of the bowl.
So before we get to the distinctive color element of this pottery, it does seem like one of its benefits is that it was made of incredibly tough material. But the distinctive quality of it is the color scheme.
DOBBINS: Well, most of them are done in a variety of colors from one to eight or so ... very brightly colored and in swirls and different patterns. But the way they color the pottery, he would make his own concrete slip and then grind minerals of different colors into that slip. So when it covered the pot, it would actually form right in into the pot. And the raw minerals gave a very bright, bright color.
So, it's different than some pottery where you're painting the dried pot. It's almost like he was dying the concrete.
DOBBINS: Yeah. he would apply the different colors while he moved the pot. And he, he actually had a device for a patent that combined like four different colors at once to the four different colors. So there's all kinds of combinations based upon the upon the speed that, that the pot is being turned and the angle that it's being turned at and what combination of colors are being used. So there's a large variety of outcomes.
So Hillhouse is exposed to this form of pottery that Horine has literally patented. An he brings it up to Sunnyslope.
DOBBINS: The people really took to it and they made a lot of pottery, they made it from 1935 to about 1939, about four years.
And if I'm not mistaken, there's kind of an interesting irony here, right? Which is that it turned out that even though the patients started making the pottery as a way to pass the time while they were hopefully recovering from tuberculosis, there was some thought that the process of making the pottery might actually worsen the symptoms.
DOBBINS: Yeah, because of the dust from the cement and they made it indoors for the most part.
But so as a result of these, these various factors, authentic Sunnyslope versions of the pots are particularly rare, right?
DOBBINS: I think so, yes. Because it's a little hard to tell because I'm pretty sure no one marked them. I only have one that I think might be from Sunnyslope. It has an old piece of masking tape on the bottom and somebody wrote in Arizona. So it's not, you know, not the best provenance, but it's the best that I found so far.
So they just seem like kind of the ultimate Phoenix artwork, you know? Because it's always extreme circumstances to live out here in the desert. But then you add the tuberculosis layer, right?
DOBBINS: Yes. So, yeah, it comes from that, that era, but they actually tried, Horine tried to take it one step further and make the make the cement using desert sand, local desert sand. Apparently it didn't work. So, but other than that, it would have been great. It would have been even better.
