Route 27 runs from Richmond in the south all the way down to the tip of the Boothbay peninsula. Forty-something miles of pine trees and farm stands and old farmhouses and the particular kind of roadside that Maine gets in the summer, when the light is long and everyone is somewhere between where they came from and where they’re going.
Somewhere in the middle of that corridor, in Edgecomb, there’s a cluster of red buildings at 727 Boothbay Road. A pottery studio has been in those buildings since the 1970s. The trees around them were a lot shorter then.
Route 27 is one of the main roads into the Boothbay peninsula, one of the most-visited stretches of coastal Maine. More than 30,000 visitors come through the Edgecomb corridor each season. For fifty years, a lot of them stopped at the red buildings on the way.
My parents started the pottery. My father Richard threw pots. My mother Chris ran the gallery. They built the place from nothing, on a road they believed in, in a state they loved. They worked there for decades. The place grew up around their work.
I grew up around all of it. The clay smell and the kiln cycles and the particular rhythm of a tourist season. The way the crowds thin in September and the light on Route 27 goes gold and the summer people head home and the road gets quiet again. I know this road the way you know a place you’ve been watching your whole life.
Fifty years is a long time for anything. For a small family business on a two-lane road in Maine, it’s a kind of miracle. It’s also a lot of seasons. A lot of kiln loads. A lot of mornings opening the doors and not knowing who would walk in.
What Route 27 gives you, if you’re patient enough to stay on it, is flow. People in the summer move toward the coast. They’re in a mood to stop, to look, to spend an afternoon somewhere they’ve never been. A roadside gallery on the way to Boothbay Harbor is perfectly placed to be that place. We’ve benefited from that geography for fifty years, and we’re still grateful for it.
“Same spot, same family, same Route 27 corridor that brings 30,000 visitors through our doors every year. Just a whole lot more to see.”
When we decided to open the space to other artists, the thinking wasn’t complicated. The gallery had the location, the foot traffic, the infrastructure that takes decades to build. Individual artists have the work, the craft, the particular thing that only they can make. Putting those two things together just made sense.
The pottery co-op model has been around for a long time, but the Route 27 location makes ours specific. We’re not in a city. We’re not in a tourist district with ten galleries within walking distance. We’re on a road in midcoast Maine that people drive for a reason, and when they stop, they’re stopping at us. That’s a responsibility, and we take it seriously.
The Artist Collective opened in spring 2026 at the same address the pottery has occupied for fifty years: 727 Boothbay Road, Edgecomb. Same building. Same red paint. Same long driveway through the pines.
New faces on the walls. New work on the shelves. But the same thing the place has always been about: handmade work, made in Maine, by people who mean it.
If you’ve driven Route 27 before and stopped here, come back. Something new is happening.