The Handcrafted Centennial

Folk School celebrates 100 with comprehensive update of antique cabin

In the first decades of the last century, a newly married northern couple arrived in the hills around Asheville asking questions about Appalachian folkways, traditions, and crafts. Indiana-born John C. Campbell and his wife Olive Dame, a Massachusetts native, were part of a new generation of young people with a passion for cultural preservation. Although Campbell didn’t live to see the couple’s dream of an Appalachian folk school take shape, his widow and her friend Marguerite Butler brought Brasstown’s John C. Campbell Folk School into being in 1925.

Today, the school teaches intensive classes year round in more than 50 disciplines of visual and performing arts, and will celebrate its centenary this fall with multiple happenings. A centerpiece to the anniversary is the rededication of the Log Cabin Museum, first opened in 1926, with new exhibits exploring the arts, crafts, and lifestyles of the Appalachian people. The building has suffered extensive weathering and deterioration over the century, and the restored venue will honor those traditions, with its scope considerably expanded. 

“Now that a century has passed, more history has been told truthfully,” says the school’s executive director Bethany Chaney. “We made the intentional decision to engage [local] Cherokee and African American voices in the exhibits in each room.”

The cabin is actually comprised of two separate structures donated to the school in 1926, both disassembled at their original sites in Cherokee and Clay counties and rebuilt by a local crew of some 20 men as a single, 795-square-foot structure joined together by a “dogtrot” (Southern Appalachian parlance for breezeway). One of the cabins pre-dates the Civil War by a decade; the other dates to the late nineteenth century. 

The cabin was brought back to life slowly, the old-fashioned way. Over the past two years, a team of workers drawn from school staff and from the surrounding community learned the necessary traditional skills with the help of Barry Stiles, director of Foxfire Village and Museum in Mountain City, Georgia, an hour away from Brasstown. The team hand-hewed logs for new support beams, restored the hearths of the cabin’s two stone fireplaces and provided a new, insulated cedar-shake roof, among other necessary improvements. 

However, many examples of Appalachian handiwork had survived the century — floors made of split chestnut logs, a typical nineteenth-century building material for mountain farmers; handmade wooden hinges on doors and windows; and the cabin’s most unique feature, one of the its two chimneys constructed with layers of wood interlaced with daubed clay. Very few such “stick and mud” chimneys are thought to survive anywhere else in the state.

“The most challenging part of the process has actually been around exhibit design,” Chaney says of the two-year-long road to reopening the Museum. “In the end, we all had to agree that the museum could not be just another two-room cabin staged like a homestead. It needed to be a different kind of experience.”

Dr. Kelley Totten, who led the immersive Community Field School on and off campus in early spring, again involving community members (this time for culture documentation), was in charge of content curation. And the Folk School’s collections & archives manager Susanna Pyatt has helped to coordinate the exhibit-creation process.

“It’s exciting to see the Log Cabin Museum re-imagined and revitalized,” says Pyatt, who names all the players, including the building-and-grounds crew. “It was a complex project with a lot of moving parts and small details — a team effort.”

John C. Campbell Folk School, 1 Folk School Road, Brasstown, NC. The 49th annual Fall Festival and 100th Anniversary Celebration happens Saturday, Oct. 4 and Sunday, Oct. 5, 10am-4pm. On Friday, Nov. 7, a “Forge After Dark: Blacksmithing Evening Event” goes 6pm until midnight. Info at folkschool.org. Fog