Handwoven coverlet in “Sea Star” draft. Designed by Winogene Redding and woven by Josie Watson in 1936. Arrowmont Permanent Collection. Photo by author, 2024.
The charm of the coverlet pattern may not be at once apparent, but hang a "Whig Rose" or a "Dogwood Blossom" in the most elegant parlor you can find, and presently that homespun, home-dyed, home-woven fabric will be "the cynosure of every eye." The walls may be hung with masterpieces in oil and water-color, the windows curtained with costly lace, the doorways draped with portières of oriental silk and the floors carpeted with oriental rugs. Still the coverlet, though worn and faded, will hold its own in the midst of all this magnificence, because the hand that made it was guided by the soul of an artist.
Eliza Calvert Hall, 1912
Since the end of June, I have been the Kenneth R. Trapp Craft Assistant/Curatorial Fellow at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, TN. This 11-month fellowship entails researching and curating an exhibition in the largest of the galleries on campus, and I have chosen to focus on handwoven household textiles and their connections to history, memory, and community. The exhibition will be called “Common Threads” and will be open from February 24th to March 28th.
I am also hoping that this turns into a couple of academic articles and possibly a book. However, I have felt stuck for a few weeks, so I decided that I would start writing some blog posts about it to help me relate my research to a wider audience.
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Whig Rose overshot placemat in the Arrowcraft Collection, Arrowmont Permanent Collections. Photo by author, 2024.
Situating Arrowmont in Gatlinburg
A little background on Arrowmont is in order, and we should start by getting the lay of the land.
Located in the Great Smoky Mountains along a major footpath used by Cherokee hunters, the settlement that would become Gatlinburg began with William Ogle, who hewed the logs for the first cabin to be built there in around 1802. He died shortly thereafter, but his wife, Martha Jane Husky Ogle, brought their seven children, her brother, and his family to settle there a few years later. The settlement grew slowly over the next few decades, and its name was changed from White Oak Flats to Gatlinburg in 1856 after the establishment of a post office in Radford C. Gatlin’s general store.1 However, the roads into Gatlinburg remained difficult to travel, and local people were largely self-sufficient by necessity, making most of the things they needed, including textiles, baskets, furniture, and tools. Cash-poor and isolated, they had little or no access to doctors or formal education.
There are two main events in the early 20th century that helped to transform Gatlinburg from a sleepy mountain hamlet into what it is today: one is the establishment of the National Park in 1935, which led to a massive influx of surveyors, contractors, laborers, and eventually tourists, and the other, just a couple of decades earlier, was the arrival of a delegation from the Pi Beta Phi women’s fraternity, which wanted to create a settlement school to provide education and healthcare in this isolated place. Thanks to the latter, local people in Gatlinburg were better prepared to deal with the radical changes set into motion by the new park. In just one generation, their education and health improved to the point that the settlement school had effectively accomplished its mission and had to reorient, focusing increasingly on craft education and sales and eventually becoming an arts and crafts school in response to changing needs and the new community of artists who were drawn to it.
Domestic sciences students on the porch of the Pi Beta Phi Settlement School’s Pollard building in the 1930s. Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts Archives.
Today, Gatlinburg is known mostly as a tourist attraction for two main reasons: it is the gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and it’s just a hop away from Dollywood in Pigeon Forge. The hills around Gatlinburg are filled with vacation cabins, and the main strip is constantly busy with tourists visiting the many souvenir shops and Ripley’s attractions. To my eye, downtown Gatlinburg is a theme park caricature of the old ways of life mixed with the kinds of tourist business you see in any such place — candy shops, arcades, knife shops, dispensaries, etc. From my little apartment on a hill that overlooks the strip, there is a glaring contrast between its bright, multicolored lights and the quiet darkness of the forest at my back.
Gatlinburg’s Craft Communities
Many old-time residents are still around, and there is a large craft community mostly nestled into an area along and adjacent to Glades Road, which is on the periphery of town and does not get the kind of intense traffic of the more populated area. There, the artists who make up the Great Smoky Arts and Crafts Community produce handmade things for the tourist trade and collectors, and many of today’s makers come from multigenerational artisan families who have made their living from arts and crafts since the 1920s.
While the Arts and Crafts Community is at the periphery of Gatlinburg, Arrowmont is hidden at its center while also being one of its most outward-facing institutions. Although it once was the visible heart of this community, today it is cut off from the main road by the tourist businesses that have grown up along the strip. At the same time, it attracts artists and students from all over the United States and abroad with its exhibitions and “national workshops”: one and two-week residential arts and crafts workshops in ceramics, fibers, textiles, painting, drawing, metals, woodworking, and other media and techniques. But this also comes with a need to strike a balance between bringing in outside talent and engaging with and recognizing the craft community that has grown along with the school for over 100 years. Depending on who you ask and when you ask them, you’ll get many different answers about how to do this.
In sum, Gatlinburg is a complicated place where arts and crafts still thrive. Despite the fine baskets, brooms, and wooden furniture that were popular in the early days of cottage industry crafts here, the heart of its early commitment to craft was weaving, much of it in the form of overshot weaving based on the beloved coverlet patterns that so astonished visitors to mountain homes throughout Appalachia. In part 2, we’ll pick up with overshot weaving and the establishment of Arrowcraft.
"Aunt Lizzie Reagan, at the Pi Beta Phi School, Gatlinburg, Tennessee, weaving old-fashioned jean. Very few can weave this kind of cloth now. She is 75 years old and lives near the school, earning her living by weaving." Photo by Lewis Hine, 1933. National Archives at College Park.
