Those Glowing Detroit Tiles All Come From One Little 1903 Pottery

If you’ve ridden Detroit’s People Mover, sat in one of its old churches, or walked through Detroit Metro Airport, you’ve probably seen them without knowing it: glowing, iridescent ceramic tiles in deep blues and greens. Almost all of them trace back to one small pottery on the city’s east side — and it’s been firing kilns since 1903.

That’s Pewabic Pottery, founded the very same year as Ford Motor Company. While Detroit was busy inventing the assembly line, a quieter movement was taking root too — the Arts and Crafts movement, which celebrated things made by hand. Pewabic became its Detroit home.

The driving force was Mary Chase Perry Stratton, an artist and self-taught chemist who became fascinated with recreating the shimmering, iridescent glazes seen on old Persian and Asian ceramics. She experimented for years and eventually formulated hundreds of glazes of her own. Because it was nearly impossible for a woman to own a business at the time, she partnered with Horace Caulkins, a dental-supply man who built high-heat kilns. Together they made something that lasted.

And it really has lasted. Pewabic is one of the oldest continually operating potteries in the country, still working out of its 1907 studio. Its handmade tiles grace landmarks far beyond Michigan — including the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and the Basilica of the National Shrine in Washington, D.C. — and closer to home in places like the Guardian Building and the Detroit Public Library. In 1991 the studio and its contents were named a National Historic Landmark.

It’s still a working studio, museum, and school all at once. You can visit, watch potters at work, see the old kilns, and take home a tile of your own — a small, glowing piece of Detroit history, made the same way it was more than 120 years ago.