Renowned potter, Lee McCarty in his studio. PHOTO BY JARED BURLESON.
burned up. Lord have mercy, that was terrible.” Things like his dad and granddad’s scale that was used as the official weight scale for the county. Things like a 55-inch “huge ass” cape buffalo that hung just far enough off the ground for an athletic 5’8” boy to barely touch with his fingertips. But you better believe that didn’t stop Westerfield. “Opened it in 139 days from the day it burned to the day it opened up,” he said with a sense of pride. New animals hang from the walls, many volunteered by wives who wanted nothing to do with them. Some duplicates of pictures from the old restaurant, but mostly new ones. A new scale placed in the exact same position as the old one. A kitchen bigger than most Delta restaurants. But everything else is pretty much the same. The layout is the same. The same size, same height. Just made of white pine from North Carolina now. Same boilers, too. In fact, the same employee has been boiling crawfish at Crawdad’s for the past 24 years. He has cooked “more crawfish than anybody in the Delta without any doubt, and probably more than anybody in the state of Mississippi,” Westerfield says with a prideful grin.
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Oh yeah. One more difference — a powerful sprinkler system. Westerfield asked the installer if it would put out a fire. The response: “Sir, you got enough water in here that you better get the small children off the floor.”
The McCartys A few paces down the road sits a “simple, but elegant” restaurant, a 180-degree turn in the other direction from the testosterone-heavy atmosphere at Crawdad’s. The Gallery was started by worldrenowned potter Lee McCarty, who opened his McCarty’s Pottery studio in August of 1954. McCarty and his wife Pup, who died in 2009, took an old mule barn and converted it into the studio and pottery outlet. They insulated the old barn with cardboard, sweated in summer and froze in winter. In 1960, he won a national award at the Delgado Museum in New Orleans for his stoneware and began winning other honors around the country, drawing widespread media attention for the pottery he and Pup fashioned from clay that William Faulkner gave them from a ravine on his property in Oxford. Soon, people were showing up from other countries and every Delta garden club seemed to know just how