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Hippie Homesteaders
Traditional Handcrafts in West Virginia
By Carter Taylor Seaton West Virginia University Press
Copyright © 2014 Carter Taylor Seaton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-938228-91-9
CHAPTER 1
Traditional Handcrafts in Appalachia
When the back-to-the-landers came to West Virginia in the 1960s and 1970s, their arrival couldn't have been more serendipitous, but that is only obvious in hindsight. They came seeking a place to live simply, to be free from the trappings of urban materialism, and to be allowed to mind their own business. No doubt, when they learned basketry, blacksmithing, wood turning or broom-making from their neighbors, most of them were unaware of West Virginia's long held handcraft tradition. They simply wanted to master a skill they hoped would be of practical use, provide an income, or both. Little did they know they would have a role in saving the state's craft heritage and ensuring its future.
Since the Appalachian region was settled in the late seventeen hundreds and early eighteen hundreds, handcrafts have been woven as tightly into the fabric of daily life as the rivers that wind through its mountains. The English, Scots-Irish, and German settlers who migrated to the hills looking for land, freedom, and a chance for a new life brought many practical skills with them. Their ingenuity allowed them to develop the handcrafts now considered central to the Appalachian tradition. Unlike the gentry who had settled near the coast, the mountain folks created handcrafted objects that were, for the most part, practical in nature. Aristocratic ladies who practiced any of the more delicate arts — tatting, bobbin lacemaking, embroidery, painting, and drawing — did so primarily as a time-passing hobby, to perfect their skills, and to adorn their homes, not because they had to for survival. In the mountains, women sewed out of necessity, making clothing for their families and linens for their homes. Men took up woodworking and metalworking to build and furnish their homes, and to fashion necessary farm tools.
This is not to say the products weren't also beautiful — often, they were highly decorated — but functionality was usually uppermost in the maker's mind. In fact, this combination of functionality and beauty often made the objects a pleasure to look at as well as to use. While the tools and implements of everyday life were critical, the Appalachian transplants found time to satisfy their aesthetic sensibilities as well. Blacksmiths forged essential items like wagon tongues and door hinges, but they also formed decorative fireplace tools and wrought iron candlesticks. Tinsmiths fashioned kitchen utensils like plates, ladles, and cups, as well as delicately pierced lanterns.
These hardscrabble pioneers who chose to tame the Appalachian Mountains turned to the plentiful natural resources they found to supply their everyday needs, and excellent craftsmanship was a hallmark of their work. Leathersmiths tanned hides and made carrying sacks, harnesses, saddlebags, belts, and even the blacksmiths' bellows, but they also used their talents to fashion beautiful vests and jackets. Craftsmen felled the magnificent hardwoods to build furniture, fences, and log cabins, or whittled them into bowls and cooking utensils, musical instruments, gunstocks, and even toys for their children. They split oak into thin strips, soaked them, and wove them into baskets. Coopers bent wood into barrels for storage of grains and whiskey.
Farming provided more than just sustenance. Straw and cornhusks became brooms and often dolls. Vegetables and nuts provided the dyes to color wool and cotton fibers. Carding sheep's wool, spinning yarn, and weaving it into cloth were at the heart of the pioneer woman's day. Precious little went to waste. Quilts were often made of scraps from outgrown clothes or leftover cloth, padded with worn-out blankets or cotton batting, then closely stitched together in layers. They evolved into works of art, as decorative as they were practical. Indeed, some of today's most precious antiques are the woven coverlets and patchwork or appliquéd quilts of that era.
No doubt in some places, traditional handcrafts have been practiced without interruption since the immigrants' arrival on our shores; however, by 1890 many of the old ways in this country had been abandoned as the Industrial Revolution mechanized processes formerly done by hand. However, in West Virginia, as in much of Appalachia, these skills persisted as part of daily life longer than in other parts of the United States because of the relative isolation of the region. Over the years, though, both the need for these practical skills and the public's appreciation of them have ebbed and flowed.
Beginning in the 1820s, the tools of everyday life in most of America could be bought from a traveling salesman or ordered from a catalog. Soap, candles, belt buckles, brooms, and eating utensils found their way to the shelves of the general store. Only those without cash or access to shopping — as in the mountains — continued making these necessities by hand. Owning store-bought goods gave a family a certain elevated status by signaling a measure of prosperity, while families that still made their own were seen as quaint and old-fashioned. Therefore, following the Civil War, when local-color writers for the monthly magazines that had sprung up during this time "discovered" Appalachia, they noted traits, customs, and even lifestyles that were markedly different and anachronistic in comparison with the rest of America. They viewed and wrote about this abiding craft tradition by describing Appalachian culture as primitive, simplistic, and a marker of how much progress the rest of the nation had made.
Then, like a pendulum swinging from one extreme to the other, the appreciation for handcrafted products revived as the days of the Industrial Revolution waned and the Arts and Crafts Movement took hold. Influenced by England's John Ruskin, who in 1851 bemoaned the sameness of manufactured goods and championed the creativity of handcrafted products, this movement grew in influence from the 1880s to the 1930s. William Morris followed Ruskin in establishing a firm in England for the creation of craft designs in the decorative arts. Interest in the idea espoused by these two, as well as by Gustav Stickley — that craft was a moral force in society — took root in America in the 1870s. The three men argued that because handcrafted goods demanded creativity and showed individuality, they embodied an essential humanity that manufactured goods could not.
By now, Appalachia's quaintness had begun to be a niggling problem for a nation looking to celebrate its unity following Reconstruction and in the face of the upcoming centennial. Defined as "different," Appalachia needed to be brought into the modern era to become part of the mainstream. It needed to be helped. In the 1890s, in reaction to the all-male patriotic societies that were founded in anticipation of America's 1876 centennial, women began forming their own civic organizations. The Daughters of the American Revolution, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Colonial Dames were concerned with issues of women's rights, education, and health care. Not surprisingly, they turned some of their attention to the Appalachian region. Accepting widespread thought that it was an impoverished and culturally backward region, they willingly offered to help improve Appalachian lives.
During the ensuing settlement-house era, teachers and missionaries began to move into Appalachia to bring education and culture to the region, and teaching craft skills became a staple in their settlement and industrial schools. Soon the sale of locally made crafts became the standard means of raising both income and recognition for the mountain settlement schools while providing financial assistance to the producing families. Although the list of well-meaning reformers who descended on Appalachia is long and well documented, few if any seem to have settled in West Virginia. In 1892, William Goodell Frost, the president of Berea College in Kentucky, began a successful fundraising campaign for the college by suggesting that making handmade objects contributed to the betterment of good moral character and education in the mountain folk. Following Frost, Frances Goodrich established Allanstand Workshop in Asheville, North Carolina; Katherine Pettit and May Stone founded the Hindman Settlement School in Hindman, Kentucky (although Pettit eventually broke away to establish her own school, Pine Mountain Settlement School, in 1913); Mrs. George W. Vanderbilt started Biltmore Industries; Olive Dame Campbell established the John C. Campbell Folk School; weaver Lucy Morgan founded the Penland School of Crafts; and O.J. Matil of the Pi Beta Phi sorority founded a settlement school near Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
Each of these schools taught craft techniques of the past to the mountain folk. The founders believed that the "methods, aesthetics, and community of preindustrial labor offered an antidote to the ills of industrial society, as well as a foundation for social and economic uplift." However, they often have been criticized for designing the products they taught local people to make. More than one writer has charged that they were tainting the true heritage craft tradition instead of perpetuating it, as they claimed. Moreover, the women who performed the work had little or no say in what they produced, or the price for which it was sold. None of their work was made for their own use, but rather for sale to consumers with "high average buying power" and urban tastes. This sales savvy often motivated workshop directors to further alter many traditional craft designs to meet the perceived market demand.
As directors of these schools became aware of each other, they formed the Southern Industrial Educational Association to provide a common meeting ground. In 1909, the association established an annual sale of mountain made crafts called The Exchange in Washington, D.C. From it, national interest in Appalachian crafts grew, attracting the attention of Allen H. Eaton of the Russell Sage Foundation. A longtime supporter of craftwork, he began organizing craft cooperatives in Appalachia that became, in 1930, the nucleus of the Southern Highland Craft Guild, which is still active today.
Then came the Depression, when purchasing ground to a near halt. American citizens could ill-afford food, let alone consumer goods. Eleanor Roosevelt came to West Virginia in 1931 and saw the destructive poverty. Following the creation of three West Virginia experimental communities — Eleanor, Arthurdale, and Tygart Valley — that were founded under the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, she suggested that groups of women band together to produce furniture as an economic development project. Although the project ultimately failed, the town of Eleanor was a model community founded on her principles. Rather than bringing an outside designer to West Virginia to oversee production, Roosevelt employed a Hardy County chair maker, Samuel Isaac Godlove, to teach the miners to make a simple chair that his family had produced for years. The project provided work for too few people, however, and without the infusion of other industries, the model community experiment was abandoned.
It is interesting to note that, save for the Eleanor experiment, the outside influences exercised on the indigenous crafts in other Appalachian states — Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee — are largely absent in West Virginia. While that fact left crafts there unchanged, the heritage crafts still practiced as handed down through families were in danger of disappearing less than twenty years later. During the 1950s and 1960s, the state's youth left in droves for more fertile job markets both north and south, often leaving their elders with no one at home to take up the craft skills they'd been practicing for several generations. Therefore, when the back-to-the-landers arrived in the state in the late 1960s and early 1970s, their arrival proved to be fortuitous for both the incoming artisans, the heritage crafts tradition, and, ultimately, the state.
Copycatting the flurry of patriotic activity that surrounded America's first centennial, West Virginia's state government began, in 1960 and 1961, looking for ways to mark the state's upcoming 100th birthday in 1963. The West Virginia Department of Commerce (WVDOC) wrote to counties, municipalities, civic organizations, and other groups, asking them to develop projects that would showcase West Virginia's history and culture. They wanted to know what the state's people did well that could be put on display for the world to see. Out of the surveys came word that the Department of Agriculture had been besieged with requests from rural women who wanted to sell their baskets, quilts, and other handcrafts at the county fairs. However, from the perspective of the Department of Agriculture, the county fair was for selling products of the farm, not the hearth.
Simultaneously, the folks at the WVDOC were looking for new economic development engines for the state, other than coal mining, timbering, or farming. Following European models that showed tourism and crafts were mutually beneficial to the economy, they began to look for ways to use crafts to promote the state during the centennial. With the nation's poverty level at 19 percent in the early 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson launched his War on Poverty by creating the federal Office of Economic Opportunity to develop solutions that could be implemented on a statewide basis. Similarly, the Appalachian Regional Commission formed and began looking at ways to stimulate the economy in its thirteen-state region. Since West Virginia was in the center of this depressed area and the poverty level there was almost 35 percent, federal dollars began to pour in. When several national studies, including one conducted by West Virginia University, showed rural economic development was best achieved through cottage industries, savvy community organizers set out to establish craft cooperatives.
By the late 1960s or early 1970s, several strong regional organizations were operating. Mountain Artisans, a non-profit sewing cooperative, was formed by Sharon Percy Rockefeller, Florette Angel, designer Dorothy Weatherford, and others to provide income to rural families in the counties around Charleston through the sale of quilted and patchwork wearables and home fashions. In Parkersburg, another co-op, Rural Arts and Crafts, specialized in making stuffed toys and provided income to Wood County families. VISTA workers James Thibeault and Colleen Anderson formed Cabin Creek Quilts at the insistence of the women in that area who wanted a market for their handmade quilts and pillows. In Hamlin, the Lincoln County Artisans cooperative, started through the local community action council, grew into Appalachian Craftsmen, Inc. in 1971, with the support of the Junior League of Huntington and Southwestern Community Action Council. This group, with headquarters in Huntington, sold women's clothing, toys, and home furnishings based on traditional quilting patterns and designs.
According to Don Page, who worked for the WVDOC during those early years, this development of cottage craft industries was right up the department's alley. Under the direction of Hulett C. Smith, the first director of the WVDOC and later governor of the state, and David Callaghan, his arts and crafts coordinator, a plan was implemented. "They found out that where tourism flourished, crafts developed; and where crafts were flourishing, tourism increased. They went hand in hand," Don says. With the knowledge that the state had people who made handcrafts well, the department applied for and received a federal grant to send technical representatives into the field to find them. Don was one of those hired in 1963, along with Jane Cox George, John Harper, Jr., and K. Carl Little. Their task was to find folks who were making arts and crafts, evaluate the marketability of their work, improve their skills and techniques where necessary, and develop markets for them both inside and outside the state. "We went everywhere," he recalls. "I took a West Virginia map and a black magic marker. I blacked out every road I drove that was on that map. Each time, I would take a different route."
What Don and the others expected to find were indigenous people making crafts that had persisted in the area since its settlement — quilting, basket making, broom making, or whittling — but what he recalls discovering, along with the old-timers, was a cadre of college-educated young people who had escaped the establishment, had settled in West Virginia, and were living off the land. These artisans were producing a different level of handcrafted goods. Their work, while often based on or learned from the indigenous folk, was more non-traditional in design and in its level of sophistication. Hand-carved rocking horses became braying donkeys. Baskets had, not wooden, but forged metal handles. Brooms might be dyed purple or scarlet. One artisan's pots had gained such a level of artistry that a shop owner asked him if he could rough them up so they would look handmade.
Some — already craftsmen when they arrived — had brought training and skills that put them in a different league, like the studio glass blowers he found. Others, Don says, "just looked at what people were doing here: baskets, and blacksmithing, and woodworking, and they wanted to learn it. A lot of them hung out with the older people or went to the craft fairs. They began to emulate and copy and try to become proficient in traditional work. There was a marriage of the traditional craftsman and the ones who came in." While some of the older artisans pushed the design envelope and experimented with new color combinations or designs, many preferred to stick with the traditions that had been handed down to them. All co-existed peacefully. Craftsmen of the old school were not threatened by the newcomers' designs. As long as each was happy with their work, they could and did exhibit side by side.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hippie Homesteaders by Carter Taylor Seaton. Copyright © 2014 Carter Taylor Seaton. Excerpted by permission of West Virginia University Press.
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