The Delhom Service League: 50 Golden Years

The Delhom Service League: 50 Golden Years celebrates the Delhom Service League’s enthusiastic support for the Mint by proudly displaying significant works funded or gifted by the affiliate group, plus selected publications, photographs and other memorabilia. In 2022, the Delhom Service League made the difficult decision to dissolve as a Mint affiliate. The league nevertheless remains an indelible part of the Mint’s history, and its many contributions rightly deserve the museum’s never-ending recognition and gratitude.

About the Delhom Service League:

In 1965, The Mint Museum purchased the exceptional collection of British, European, and Asian ceramics from Chicago collector M. Mellanay Delhom. Two years later, once the museum finished building a new wing that included a large gallery to display her holdings, Miss Delhom — as she preferred to be called — began offering weekly classes, open to the public, to discuss the works on view.

Many of the class attendees started volunteering their time in the Delhom Gallery to answer questions from museum visitors and offer tours. As the popularity of the gallery steadily increased, those volunteers realized that they needed a more formal structure for handling the increased demand for their services. They initiated discussions with museum leadership, and in 1972 the Delhom Service League (DSL) was established as a Mint affiliate.

Throughout the next 50 years, the Delhom Service League supported the museum and its ceramics collections in a myriad of ways. It sponsored world-renowned speakers, hosted public symposia and study trips, financed Mint publications and books for the museum’s library, and funded acquisitions for the museum’s permanent collection. In 2005, the Delhom Service League founded an event that was to become an immensely important and widely cherished part of its legacy to the Mint: The Potters Market Invitational.

The league invited some 40 potters practicing their craft in North Carolina to sell their wares in a large tent on the front lawn of Mint Museum Randolph. The first Potters Market Invitational was so successful that the DSL continued to organize the event (now called Potters Market at the Mint) every year until 2021.