The present-day Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, located upon a peaceful estate in the heart of commercial Gatlinburg, attests to the imagination of a generous group, the cooperation of a chosen community, and the lasting good works of both. Like Qualla, like the CCC camps, like the park today, and, most of all, like the Walker place, Arrowmont signifies the profound beauty that can result when people practice a simple respect for their homeland.
Handicrafts
Woods and meadows, fields and mines and swamps, every part of the natural scene yielded some material that could be transformed into a handcrafted article of usefulness and beauty. From the trees came richly grained lumber for furniture and musical instruments, sturdy timber for tools and utensils, and softer wood for whittling “play-pretties” and purely decorative objects. Wood-working, even sculpture, became one of the outstanding skills of mountain artisans. All the crafts involved in textile design and production were part of the region’s history: weaving and spinning, quilting and braiding and hooking, making dyes from roots, barks, vegetables, herbs. Baskets were woven from oak and hickory splits, from river cane, and honeysuckle vines.
Cherokee and mountaineer alike shared designs and shapes for the baskets made from different materials for uses ranging from egg-gathering to household storage.
Laura Thornborough
Alan Rinehart
And, as illustrated by Mrs. Matt Ownby ([left]) and Mack McCarter ([below]), basketmaking was something done by both men and women. Clay, fashioned on rude, homemade potter’s wheels of the earlier days, provided pots and pitchers of primitive handsomeness and daily utility. Broomcorn and sedge offered materials for rough but effective brooms. Leather crafts arose from the need for harnesses on mules and horse, and shoes on people. Skinning, treating, tanning were just the first steps of a long, demanding process of turning raw hide into usable leather. The use of corn shucks illustrated with special clarity the mountain person’s inventiveness in utilizing everything he raised or acquired. Corn shucks could make a stout chair-bottom or a captivating little mountain doll. Nimble fingers turned the husks into a dozen different articles. In his Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands, Allen H. Eaton wrote in 1937: “We must try to find the qualities of excellence which these people have developed before insisting that they accept our formula for living, thinking, and expression.... Better certainly, if we know, as those who have worked and lived in the Highlands have had a chance to know, what are the standards and the ideals to which the people cling. But even that experience should not be necessary for us to understand and to cherish the spirit of the young highlander who, after expressing gratitude to the missionary who had come in to help build a school, said with characteristic mountain frankness, ‘Bring us your civilization, but leave us our own culture.’”
