Editor’s Note (October 2024): We love and celebrate our mountain communities; however, following the devastation of Hurricane Helene, many areas remain inaccessible for travel. Please check DriveNC.gov’s travel map for the latest on traveling to these areas.
The airy gallery of the Folk Art Center, tucked within the forests of the Blue Ridge Parkway outside Asheville, is a riot of color and shape. Here, the Southern Highland Craft Guild has curated some of the most creative work from across western North Carolina and eight other states in the Appalachian Mountains. The eye dances across clay sculptures like hunks of pastel seafoam and coral, flawless furniture with hypnotic swirls of lumber grain, silver jewelry hammered into miniature wearable boulders.
By comparison, the sample of cloth displayed in the center’s permanent collection seems almost plain at first sight. A thin wooden frame surrounds tightly woven wool and cotton, colored in gradations of brown with natural chestnut oak dye. Yet the deeper you look, the more the work reveals itself, its double bow-knot design pulsing like a Magic Eye poster.
The Southern Highland Craft Guild began with a coverlet — woven in a double bow-knot pattern in rural Buncombe County — and the woman, Frances Goodrich, who saw its potential. Photography courtesy of The Collection of Hunter Library, Western Carolina University
Frances Goodrich Photography courtesy of Southern Highland Craft Guild
That cloth serves as a constant reminder of why any of this beauty is here to begin with. It’s taken from a reproduction of a coverlet given to Frances Louisa Goodrich in 1895 by Rebecca Taylor Davis in Brittain Cove, a tiny settlement in rural Buncombe County.
Goodrich had come to the area as a teacher, Presbyterian missionary, and social activist, seeking to uplift rural people in the spirit of Christian charity. But she also brought a sophisticated aesthetic eye, having studied art at the Yale School of Fine Arts and in New York City. In the intricate pattern of the coverlet, she saw an excellence of craft, along with a moneymaking market for a region with few other economic opportunities.
“She got this idea that a craft industry might be the thing to do, because women could do it in their homes in their spare time,” says Anne Chesky, a historian and executive director of the Presbyterian Heritage Center in Montreat. “And it could be marketed to Northerners, who were having this revival of interest in home crafts.”
A reproduction of the coverlet hangs in the Folk Art Center. photograph by Tim Robison
Western North Carolina was uniquely fertile ground for a craft industry to take off, Chesky explains. Although the isolation of its mountain hollers had kept many communities poor, it had also fostered a tradition of self-reliance, with a history of residents making goods to meet their needs instead of buying them from elsewhere. Those skills had started to fade by the time of Goodrich’s work, thanks to the arrival of the railroad (and with it, factory-made products) in 1880, but still circulated among older generations.
Goodrich helped organize the mountaineers as they sewed quilts, hooked rugs, and crafted furniture for sale, traveling between remote outposts on her trusty pony, Cherokee. By 1902, the missionary started selling those wares from a shop called Allanstand in Madison County, so named for a log building — Allan’s Old Stand — once used by drovers as they herded hogs, turkeys, and cattle from Tennessee to South Carolina.
By 1902, Goodrich had begun selling mountain crafts from a shop called Allanstand. Photography courtesy of Southern Highland Craft Guild
The business thrived, especially after it moved to downtown Asheville and started capturing interest from the city’s burgeoning tourism scene. “Monies made from the sale of their crafts have put a cow in the barn, shingles on the roof, and shoes on their children so they could go to school in the winter,” Goodrich wrote in a report to her missionary supervisors.
Similar efforts began to pop up across Appalachia, and in 1930, Goodrich helped establish the Southern Highland Craft Guild (SHCG) as a guiding force for the craft revival movement. She transferred the Allanstand shop to the organization in 1931; nearly 100 years later, the guild’s flagship store at the Folk Art Center still bears the same name. And the group itself remains animated by Goodrich’s vision, helping mountaineers make a living powered by craft and heritage.
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The SHCG’s past informs the way it navigates current challenges, says glassblower Michael Hatch, a guild member since 2005. After earning a master’s degree in critical craft studies from Warren Wilson College in 2020, he began working as the group’s archivist.
In a small office at the Folk Art Center, Hatch lays out the parallels between the guild’s origins and modern times. Back then, he points out, mountaineers accustomed to local goods were amazed by the variety on offer through the mail-order Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog. Now, Internet shopping platforms entice spending away from area makers.
Weaverville-based artist Michael Hatch creates everything from speckled globe ornaments to gleaming pumpkins to black bear paperweights in his studio, Crucible Glassworks. photograph by Tim Robison
From 19th-century railroads to today’s hulking container ships, Hatch says, increased globalization keeps pitting skilled craft against factory labor. “In the 1990s and 2000s, people were going back to other countries with pictures of stuff and creating production lines for it,” he says. “All of a sudden, Pier 1 was selling your work for pennies on the dollar of what you sell it for.”
Like Goodrich’s coverlet, the SHCG’s response to those forces weaves many strands together. The warp — the thread that gives the guild structure — has always been world-class quality. In the early Allanstand days, Goodrich would personally evaluate products according to her exacting standards, raising the bar for the entire craft community.
Artist Teresa Brittain makes the glass pieces that adorn her jewelry. photograph by Tim Robison
Her legacy carries on through the guild’s mentorship program, run by jeweler and glass-bead maker Teresa Brittain. Prospective members pair up with one of the SHCG’s more than 800 established crafters, who help them understand what the guild is looking for. The goal, she says, is for each object to reflect mastery in every aspect of its construction.
“Even if it’s a quilt that’s a wall hanging, we expect it to be as beautiful on the back as it is on the front,” Brittain explains. “If it’s a pottery vase, it needs to sit perfectly flat when you set it on the table, and it should be as well-finished on the inside as it is on the outside.”
Creative marketing provides the proverbial weft, putting members’ products in front of discerning buyers. In 1930, one early effort sent three Appalachian women on a tour of Midwestern department stores, where they set up a cabin scene and wove coverlets to drum up interest in the guild’s handicrafts. Live demonstrations still draw people to the Folk Art Center, the guild’s biannual craft fairs in Asheville, and specific event days, but those outlets are now accompanied by a robust online shop and social media presence.
That embrace of new technology is also in keeping with the SHCG’s past, Hatch says. Despite its roots in traditional skills, the guild has consistently stayed in conversation with the present: During Goodrich’s time, for example, state-of-the-art Scandinavian looms were imported for mountain weavers to work more efficiently.
Hatch’s glass-blown vases are on display at the Folk Art Center. photograph by Tim Robison
As the guild’s efforts helped western North Carolina become a craft destination, the region attracted college-trained artists who brought entirely new ways of working. By the 1960s, visitors to an SHCG fair could find Indonesian-style batik cloth and abstract metal sculptures alongside corn-husk dolls and straw brooms. The diversity of forms has only continued to grow, as evidenced by the displays at the Folk Art Center.
“We still have heritage members who do very traditional work with traditional materials, but we have a lot of contemporary craftspeople now, too,” Hatch says. “It’s a balancing act of trying to hold on to the past, look to the future, and figure out a way to market them together.”
And still, those heritage crafts remain, like the coverlet that started it all. Its materials and pattern have endured, and so has the very act of coaxing art from a loom: a proud tradition that weaves the past together with the future. — Daniel Walton
Folk Art Center
Blue Ridge Parkway Milepost 382
Asheville, NC 28805
(828) 298-7928
southernhighlandguild.org
As part of the wood-carving cooperative that would become Brasstown Carvers (pictured tin the 1940s), craftspeople received wood and instruction from John C. Campbell Folk School, which in turn purchased their work for resale. Photography courtesy of The Collection of Hunter Library, Western Carolina University
As America industrialized in the 1800s, the people of western North Carolina spun and whittled the natural resources of Appalachia into things of beauty. Out of the woodwork came John C. Campbell Folk School — founded by Olive Dame Campbell and Marguerite Butler in Brasstown in 1925 — and Penland School of Craft, established by Lucy Morgan in Bakersville in 1929.
Today, instructors at the Folk School might be third-generation woodworkers or blacksmithing doctors who learned the skill as a creative outlet, while those at Penland are full-time craftspeople or university teachers. Through immersive workshops and hands-on teaching, the instructors pass on their knowledge.
The Folk School invites artists to teach once they have shown a level of mastery in their craft, one based on age-old traditions, modern techniques, and countless hours of practice. Fiber specialist Nancy Hinds began quilting as a way to keep busy while watching her kids. In her “Playful Piecing” class, she emboldens students to explore intuitively with their designs. She herself finds satisfaction in working through the chaos, knowing that instinct is essential to confronting the challenges of craftsmanship.
Amy Putansu, who has taught weaving at Penland, also encourages students to trust their intuitions. “My hope for students on a personal level is gaining confidence and courage,” she says. “Becoming courageous in terms of being open, being willing to try things that might be a mistake. Trusting themselves.”
So the instructors guide their students to play with ideas and let one click. To test it out, be willing to pivot, then let it come together. To Putansu, those are the “[pieces] that combine excellent craftsmanship and artistry — that makes a masterpiece.” — Liz Wynne
John C. Campbell Folk School
1 Folk School Road
Brasstown, NC 28902
(828) 837-2775
folkschool.org
Penland School of Craft
67 Doras Trail
Bakersville, NC 28705
(828) 765-2359
penland.org
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