Delaware Fightin' Blue Hens (9-6) vs. College of Charleston Cougars (15-1)

The Line: College of Charleston Cougars -11.5 / Delaware Fightin' Blue Hens +11.5; Over/Under: +149 (Click here for latest betting odds)

The Delaware Blue Hens and the Charleston Cougars meet in college basketball action from the TD Arena on Saturday.

The Delaware Blue Hens will look to build on their 57-52 win over Elon last time out. Jameer Nelson Jr. leads the Blue Hens in scoring and assists with 19.8 PPG and 3.1 APG with 5 RPG as well while Jyare Davis has 16.6 PPG with 4.9 RPG and 3.5 APG this season. L.J. Owens also has 10.5 PPG to cap off the trio of double-digit scorers for Delaware up to this point in the season while Christian Ray also has a team-high 9.6 RPG to lead Delaware in rebounding up to this point in the season. As a team, Delaware is averaging 71.5 PPG on 44.8% shooting from the field, 31.8% from three and 70% from the foul line this season.

The Charleston Cougars will look to build on their double-digit win streak after a 92-79 win over North Carolina A&T last time out. Dalton Bolon leads the Cougars in scoring with 12.9 PPG and Ryan Larson has 11 PPG also posting a team-high 3.9 APG to lead the Cougars in the assist department while Reyne Smith has 10.8 PPG. Pat Robinson III has 10.8 PPG and Ante Brzovic has 10.2 PPG to cap off the group of double-digit scorers for the Cougars this year while Babacar Faye also leads Charleston on the glass with 5.9 RPG so far this season. As a team, Charleston is averaging 81.2 PPG on 44.8% shooting from the field, 33.4% from three and 74.6% from the foul line this season.

Delaware is 7-3 ATS in their last 10 road games against a team with a winning home record and 7-3 ATS in their last 10 road games against a team with a home winning percentage above .600 while the over is 5-2 in their last 7 games overall. Charleston is 16-6 ATS in their last 22 games overall and 12-5 ATS in their last 17 games against a team with a winning record while the over is 4-1 in their last 5 Saturday games.

I get the case to be made for either side here, as Charleston is the better team but this feels like a ton of points. Instead, I’m going to back the over. Both teams can score, and for Charleston it’s just a matter of how many points they give up coming back the other way as the Cougars tend to play a fast=paced and free style that doesn’t lend itself to tight defense necessarily. I think we have a track meet here. Give me the over.

In the First Hall of The Charleston Museum, a pair of stoneware vessels looms large.

Positioned one atop the other in an illuminated glass case, their mass and heft begs a question: How were those behemoths turned, coiled and lifted, let alone lugged into some cave of a kiln to be fired and dragged out once more.

Both inscribed with the date of May 13, 1859, the vessels, which were made by enslaved potter David Drake with the assistance of another enslaved man by the name of Baddler, are big. One comes in at a staggering 25¼ inches tall and 81 inches at its widest diameter; the other at 28½ inches tall. Both would hold 40 to 45 gallons.

“They’re huge,” said Chad Stewart, curator of history at The Charleston Museum.

He does not mean that as a boast, just an irrefutable fact. But the pieces certainly justify some chest-beating.

Enslaved in Edgefield

Pots the size David Drake was turning are not easy to make or to come by — particularly by this potter, who looms large in the pottery world and well beyond. The museum holds the largest known pieces by him. What’s more, his works are monumental in many other ways.

While enslaved in Edgefield, Drake, who was born around 1801 and lived until the 1870s, made and signed vessels with the name Dave. He was also known as Dave Pottery and Dave Potter, among other nicknames.

After emancipation, the potter took the surname of Harvey Drake, the Edgefield man who put him to work in an enterprise known as Pottersville that he owned with his business partner and uncle Abner Landrum, a local physician and Renaissance man. Drake was later enslaved and made pottery for others, among them Lewis Miles, for whom he did some of his most notable and signed work.

While details of David Drake’s life are lost to time, his work as a turner speaks volumes. Created for utilitarian purposes for the burgeoning pottery industry, the stoneware was created to sell for functions like storing food, benefitting from the availability of superior clay found in the area. It was then alkaline-glazed in a process likely gleaned from a similar technique used in China.

By all accounts, Drake was a large man, capable of lifting and making these massive containers. He possessed impressive intellect, too, manifest in the craftsmanship and artistry of his work. And, more telling still, his works were often graced with his poetry, whether pragmatic couplets relaying a jug’s capacity or elegiac verses reflecting on long-lost relations.

“It makes it really unique that you have a potter like Dave who not only has good handwriting, can write, can read, but can compose poetry, too, in addition to being skilled enough to make these utilitarian vessels,” Stewart said.

Drake was literate during times when it was illegal for an enslaved person to be so. The theory is that he learned to read and write while working at Landrum’s newspaper, The Edgefield Hive, with some historians speculating that Drake was a typesetter there.

That this verboten knowledge was then etched loud and proud on his pots, heading for places beyond the plantation, compels some, like Jori Finkel in a 2021 article in The New York Times, to characterize his efforts as an act of resistance.

Certainly it denotes a level of cultural nuance beyond the demands of his trade.

“Not only does he know how to write, but he’s composing poetry on these things, so it belies a certain sophistication that most White culture would have been very against in this period,” Stewart said.

Inscribed poetic verse adorns the side opposite the dates.

“Great & noble Jar hold/Sheep goat or bear”

“made at Stoney Bluff,/for making dis old gin enuff”

The Bragg era

As The Charleston Museum celebrates its 250th anniversary, a deeper dive into the provenance of its Edgefield pottery sheds light on its own history, particularly surrounding its trailblazing former museum director, Laura Bragg.

Progressive and feminist, the Massachusetts native cut a provocative figure in the Charleston cultural world, rubbing shoulders with Charleston Renaissance artists and writers and jumpstarting organizations like the first public lending library.

Bragg took the helm of the museum in 1920, becoming the first woman in that role at a publicly funded art museum. By 1921, she upended a museum policy denying admission to Black people by carving out a segregated slot for entrance on Saturday afternoons.

In her biography “A Bluestocking in Charleston: The Life and Career of Laura Bragg,” author Louise Anderson Allen recounts how in 1919 The Charleston Museum had been given one of its inscribed 40-gallon jars made by Drake.

By 1927 Bragg had become immersed in Edgefield pottery, moved by the rarity of a literate enslaved potter. Keen to ensure Drake’s pottery remained in the state, “she scoured South Carolina from Orangeburg to Aiken looking for Dave’s work and bought every piece of Edgefield pottery that the Museum could afford, purchasing over one hundred articles at this time.”

Museum records date acquisitions of Drake’s work in 1929 and 1930, and in the 1930s Bragg was said to have traveled to Edgefield to learn about Drake and acquire pieces.

In Charleston

Bragg also was said to search stops on the train line that traveled from Charleston to Bamberg, part of South Carolina Railway Company. Drake’s pots have been found in towns along the route.

A Drake vessel in The Charleston Museum is inscribed in Drake’s elegant cursive with the name of a grocer, owned by Herman Panzerbeiter that had its locale at the end of the line, on the corner of King and Columbus. “H. Panzerbeiter Groceries King & Columbus Street, Charleston, S.C.”

It is one of three known vessels customized for the grocery store, which are connected with Drake’s work for the Stony Bluff pottery of Lewis Miles, the son-in-law of Reuben Landrum who enslaved Drake in the mid-1800s, when most of Drake’s signed pieces were made. Another jar on display reads “31st July 1840” and is inscribed with “Dave belongs to Mr. Miles where the oven bakes and the pot biles.”

Today, the pottery of David Drake is increasingly in the spotlight, illuminated in national news stories and in exhibitions including “Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, S.C.” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through Feb. 5. It is set to tour thereafter, with a stop at the International African American Museum in Charleston in the works.

National spotlight

Drake’s contribution has taken on more significance still as the country seeks to redress incomplete or false narratives. His story offers a rare vantage of an enslaved person as an individual and an artist.

“(Y)ou have this person considered property ... who is so skilled at his craft, because pottery is not easy to do, but also an intelligent, literate man capable of inserting humor into his work within that dark context of American slavery.”

While the Metropolitan’s “Hear Me Now” exhibition features an array of impressive Edgefield vessels, it does not include those that are part of the permanent collection at The Charleston Museum. When approached, the museum hewed to its official policy against loaning, determining it was too risky for the works to travel.

In the legacy of Laura Bragg, it will continue on its home turf to showcase shining examples of South Carolina culture, turned and coiled and transformed into enduring, illuminating works of art.

The Charleston Museum has fossils galore. An impressive collection at America’s oldest museum includes displays of anything from megalodon teeth to bones of an extinct, massive bird species.

And what’s even more special is that most of the specimens on display — especially ones since 1979 — were all locally collected.

Staff at The Charleston Museum plan to pull out some specimens that aren’t typically on display for its 250th anniversary this year. The second half of the exhibit in June is slated to display the skull of a giant crocodile whose teeth and bones are already available for viewing, among other fossils.

Meantime, here are a few of the coolest pieces on display:

Megalodon teeth

Megatooth shark teeth are what usually get the most interest at the museum, early on, according to Matthew Gibson, natural history curator. There is an entire cabinet there of just megalodon teeth collected from places including the Edisto and Cooper rivers.

The megalodon lived millions of years ago and was about three times the length of a modern great white shark. The fish’s teeth were about as large as an adult human’s hand.

These shark teeth can potentially be found in any marine or estuary habitat; you just have to get lucky. The best ones are usually found by divers because they haven’t been tumbled around as much, Gibson said.

Most shark teeth on display at The Charleston Museum were not collected from their original sediment, though. They are typically found sitting on the bottoms of rivers and oceans, which can make it hard for scientists to narrow down the specific period they belong to.

Pelagornis sandersi

This massive bird was excavated from the Charleston International Airport site when a new section of the building was being constructed. It had a wingspan of about 21 to 24 feet, depending on how long the feathers were, Gibson said.

Researcher Daniel Ksepka formally described the specimen in 2014 and determined it was the largest flying bird to have ever lived. He named it in honor of one of the museum’s former curators, Albert Sanders.

A reconstruction of the Pelagornis sandersi is currently on display at The Charleston Museum, including some of the bird’s fragile bone pieces.

Horse teeth and limb bones

Horses went extinct here during the Ice Age. Modern wild horses are descendants of European ones, Gibson said. But on display at the museum are a few 12,000-year-old native horse teeth and bones that were collected on Edisto Beach.

Teeth, limbs and bones are often found in spoil piles from mining and dredging, or washed up on beaches and banks, according to the museum. It is rare to find horse skulls in the Lowcountry, likely because of erosion, or past mining and river dredging.

Native horses were visually very much like ones that exist today, based on their skeletons.

Glyptotherium osteoscutes

This armored animal was a giant relative of the modern armadillo. The biggest difference between the two is that the Glyptotherium was heavily armored and rigid rather that flexible, according to the museum. It was essentially a walking tank, and only parts of the animal’s head, feet and underside was susceptible to predation.

The animal went extinct here at the end of the ice age and then migrated back up from South America. Fossils on display at the museum are about 12,000 years old and were collected from Edisto Beach.

CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — Ben Burnham came off the bench to score 13 points to lead four players in double figures as No. 23 College of Charleston held on to beat Delaware 75-64 for its 15th straight win on Saturday.

Ranked for the first time in more than two decades, the Cougars were challenged from the opening tap by the Blue Hens (9-7, 1-2 Colonial Athletic Association) in the first home game since entering the Top 25.

College of Charleston (16-1, 4-0) lost its second game of the season at North Carolina but hasn’t lost since and extended the nation’s longest win streak.

With Charleston trailing, the 6-foot-7 Burnham keyed a crucial 15-5 run to help secure the victory.

A Burnham layup, short jumper and a follow dunk gave the Cougars a 65-55 lead and some much-needed breathing room.

The Cougars connected on 8 of 10 free throws over the final two minutes to hold off Delaware.

Delaware was playing without its leading scorer Jameer Nelson Jr., who was averaging more than 19 points, and missed the game with an undisclosed injury.

Delaware’s Jyare Davis and L.J. Owens kept the Blue Hens in the game in the opening half combining for 21 points.

Davis’ layup and Owens’ 3-pointer gave the Blue Hens a 15-12 advantage — Delaware’s biggest lead of the game — midway through the first half.

Charleston answered with an 11-4 run and grabbed a 23-19 lead on Burnham’s layup with 6:07 to play in the first half.

The Cougars finished the half on a 13-5 run to take a 35-27 lead into the locker room.

Dalton Bolon finished with 13 points and Ryan Larson added 12 points and six assists for Charleston.

Delaware was led by Davis’ 18 points and Christian Ray with 14 points.

BIG PICTURE

Delaware: The Blue Hens were going to have a difficult time against Charleston without Nelson in the lineup. That Delaware kept things as close as it did is something it can build on during CAA play.

Charleston: Some wondered if the Cougars had what it takes to keep winning after its landmark appearance in the Top 25 this week. They showed they did with consecutive victories against North Carolina A&T and the Blue Hens. Charleston could move up in the rankings this week.

UP NEXT

Delaware returns home to play Towson on Wednesday night.

Charleston heads to UNC Wilmington on Wednesday night.

Copyright 2023 WCSC. All rights reserved.

Percentages: FG .443, FT .538.

3-Point Goals: 3-15, .200 (Reilly 2-2, Owens 1-8, Arletti 0-1, Davis 0-1, McCoy 0-1, Novakovich 0-2).

Team Rebounds: 3. Team Turnovers: None.

Blocked Shots: 7 (Arletti 3, Asamoah, McCoy, Novakovich, Owens).

Turnovers: 13 (Davis 3, Arletti 2, Asamoah 2, Owens 2, Ray 2, Reilly 2).

Steals: 7 (Asamoah 2, Owens 2, Arletti, Davis, Ray).

Technical Fouls: Fightin Blue Hens, 13:22 first.

Percentages: FG .377, FT .727.

3-Point Goals: 5-24, .208 (Brzovic 1-1, Burnham 1-1, Robinson 1-1, Larson 1-5, Smith 1-9, Faye 0-1, Scott 0-1, Bolon 0-2, Horton 0-3).

Team Rebounds: 3. Team Turnovers: None.

Blocked Shots: 4 (Burnham 2, Scott 2).

Turnovers: 11 (Brzovic 3, Robinson 3, Bolon 2, Faye, Larson, Smith).

Steals: 5 (Bolon, Horton, Robinson, Scott, Smith).

Technical Fouls: None.

A_5,162 (5,100).