Jill and Curt Cost were living in a Volkswagen bus on Maui when they wed in 1973, but Ms. Cost knew that she wanted blue-and-white dishware for the home they were planning to build. Her mother found the perfect set at an estate sale on Oahu — all pieces from Hadley Pottery, a sought-after ceramics brand in Louisville, Ky. — and gave it to the Costs as a wedding present.
They became obsessed. Today, as the couple approaches their 52nd wedding anniversary, their daughter, Julia Cost, said the family home is “stuffed with Hadley.”
Generations of couples like the Costs started out with Hadley pottery that they received as a wedding gift. When Brenda Stanhouse was married in 1983, the mother of one of her fiancé’s close friends promised them pottery if she was invited to the wedding. “We were going to invite them anyway,” Ms. Stanhouse wrote in a Facebook group for collectors, who call themselves “Haddicts.”
It’s fitting that the pottery has become a popular wedding gift given that the pottery was itself the result of a marriage.
A Blue Horse With a Back Story
Mary Alice Hale was born in 1911 to a family of clay tile makers. She married George Hadley in 1930, and the couple eventually moved to Louisville, where Ms. Hadley — a painter with an interest in folk art — decorated a whimsical set of stoneware dishes for a cruiser they kept on the Ohio River. The Hadleys entertained a lot on the boat, and friends who saw the ceramics began to request their own.
The couple opened the Hadley Pottery factory in Louisville in 1945. Mr. Hadley managed the business and machinery, while Ms. Hadley designed and — along with a team of protégées — hand-painted household items that ranged from candleholders to lamps and tableware. The white-glazed wares featured folksy imagery in blue with green and pink accents.
Best-selling patterns have always included “Blue Horse,” an indigo-colored colt with a flowing mane, and the larger category “Country,” which depicts farmhouses, farm animals and a farmer and his wife. The cute couple was based on a pair of close friends, at whose wedding the Hadleys had been maid of honor and best man.
Ms. Hadley’s figurative style was reminiscent of Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso, and the Museum of Modern Art selected her “Brown Fleck” — a black tableware collection decorated in tan polka dots — for its Good Design exhibition in 1952. The collection, now retired, sold out at Bloomingdale’s.
Ms. Hadley was a social butterfly with a sense of humor, said Sarah Baker, Hadley’s sales and marketing manager: The bottoms of many of her cups and casserole dishes read “The End” and a cup for measuring alcohol declared “Tell Pitiful Story.”
After Ms. Hadley died of cancer in 1965 at the age of 54, her ashes were put into a Hadley flour canister with scenes from her life that she had painted for the purpose. Mr. Hadley received the same treatment later on, and the couple’s remains were ultimately released into the Ohio River.
Hadley Pottery continued under various ownership for decades but was set to close in 2022, when Brook Smith, a Louisville businessman and philanthropist, decided to buy the brand and bring it back to life.
Wedding-Ready Again
One of the company’s goals was to restart the personalized pieces it had historically offered — especially its plates for milestones like weddings, which are inscribed with the couple’s names and date of marriage.
Liz Gorey, Hadley’s business manager, said personalization “is still probably the most popular thing that we do,” and that “it’s really neat that the tradition has persisted.”
The new iteration of the company initially struggled to meet the demand and difficulty of producing custom plates, which take around an hour to paint and often fire imperfectly. With new kilns, new clay sourced by Kentucky Mudworks and a newly expanded team of artists and technicians, Hadley reintroduced the personalized dinner plates, which retail for $180 each, in February and lunch plates, which retail for $149, in April.
Last year, the company launched an online gift registry. Maggie Ratliff, its first user, knew she would eventually be willed Hadley by her grandmother — but not for a while. “She told me I’d have to go ‘years and years without it,’ as she wasn’t dying any time soon,” Ms. Ratliff, 24, said with a smile.
So for now, Ms. Ratliff, a prop stylist in Birmingham, Ala., and her husband, Sam, were gifted a wedding plate, plus some 50 pieces in the “Country” scheme.
Hadley is often an heirloom. Sheila Pfeffer Hauersperger, 68, who lives in Jasper, Ind., found the big bowl and mugs that she inherited recorded in her mother’s bridal gift book. “I treasure them,” she said.
This month, Michaella Gaines, a 32-year-old who lives in Boston, registered for pieces to backfill a family collection that pictures clipper ships and whales — a nod to her childhood on Martha’s Vineyard, where she will be married in September.
The pottery is as an “approachable gift,” she said. It’s “something we’ll use for years and years down the road.”
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