Smokies Life Fall 2019: The Gatlinburg Arts and Crafts Community Article

The Gatlinburg Arts and Crafts Community

A COMPLE X MONTAGE OF HISTORY AND HERITAGE THAT GREW IN TANDEM WITH THE NATIONAL PARK

STORY BY SUE WASSERMAN · PHOTOS BY VALERIE POLK Smokies Life

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Clockwise from top left: Janavee Ownby from Ownby’s Woodcraft demonstrates weaving a reed herringbone-patterned seat. Burled wood slab used for Chris Compton’s one-of-a-kind tables found at Wood Whittlers. Bluebird pair meticulously carved by the Whaleys and displayed on a sculptural piece of wood at Whaley Handcrafts. Wooden fruit from Proffitt’s Woodworks reveals warm tones of walnut, cherry, maple and cedar. David Ogle sews one of his many handmade brooms at Ogle’s Broom Shop.

While visitors travel from around the

loop that connects Highway 321,

globe to be part of nature’s artistry

Glades Road and Buckhorn Road.

in Great Smoky Mountains National

Generally referred to as the Glades,

Park, they’re often unaware of the

the artisan community was loosely

incredible handcrafted artistry that

founded in 1937 and has become a

awaits them in Gatlinburg’s Great

destination for national park visitors.

Smoky Arts and Crafts Community.

In this article, the first of a series,

According to organization Presi-

you’ll get to meet some of the artists

dent Jann Peitso, it is the largest of

whose families have not only made

its kind in the country, comprised of

the region home over many gener-

more than 100 artists and craftspeo-

ations but have also produced fine

ple, most of whom operate their stu-

crafts that have become synony-

dios and shops along an eight-mile

mous with the region.

Ogle. Ownby. Whaley. Proffitt.

Long before the Great Smoky Arts and Crafts Community or Great Smoky Mountains National Park were created, these generations-old families lived quiet lives tending the land. Their names and stories are etched in Gatlinburg’s rich history.

“Many of our members’ kin grew up in what is now the park,” says Jann Peitso, president of Great Smoky Arts and

Crafts Community. “The park soil is their soil. It holds their roots. In the early years, as more visitors came to view their new national park, they were looking for the people who lived here. They wanted to hear their stories. The park and arts community have grown together. Our visitors want to experience something as basic as nature and as homespun as a woven place mat or turned wood rolling pin.”

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Above: Woodturned cherry plates embellished with a woodburned pattern by Janis Proffitt. Above left: Janis and Jacki Proffitt, sisters who carry on their family’s woodworking tradition dating back seven generations. Above right: Jacki Proffitt intuitively uses a chisel to shape a block of spalted maple into a small vase on the wood lathe. Left: A small woodturned vase shows the distinctive character of spalted maple.

“Daddy used to say trees are like people; no two are alike.” ~ Jacki Proffitt, wood worker, speaking of her father, Ellis Proffitt’s Woodworks’ ladies of the lathe Jacki Proffitt enjoys telling the story of a young man who visited her family’s shop one day hoping to sell his load of firewood. Short on cash, and without a pressing need, she intended to turn him down until she took a closer look at his woodstove-bound cargo. Reticence quickly turned to eagerness when she discovered his truck bed was filled with spalted maple.

For a seasoned woodturner like Jacki, stumbling onto the distinctively colored and patterned wood was like

finding the motherlode. “There was no way I was going to throw that beautiful wood into the woodstove,” she says.

After negotiating the price, she happily assumed ownership, eager to place the possibility-laden pieces on the lathe and read them just the way her father had taught her so many years before.

“Daddy used to say trees are like people; no two are alike,” Jacki recalls. She and her sister Janis, who refer to themselves as ladies of the lathe, are proud not only to carry on their father Ellis’ work at Proffitt’s Woodworks but also to carve their own niche in the family woodworking tradition,

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which dates back seven generations. Their workshop and retail storefront, located on their great-grandparents’ property, is a museum of sorts, housing a wide variety of hand tools used by their father, grandfather and great-grandfather.

“If only these things could talk, there’d be some great stories,” Jacki says.

While the tools may not talk, Jacki and Janis regularly share their family’s history while talking about the turned bowls, vases, wooden fruit, flowers and more the two sisters craft. You can find the sisters’ work at their studio just beyond the artist community loop on Highway 321.

When she knows visitors’ curiosity has been piqued, Jacki will show how she reads the wood to coax color from the fungi-influenced spalting or reminisce about family members like her beloved grandmother, who was married at 14 and known by locals for the tasty biscuits she made.

Visitors leave with more than just a handcrafted, frequently functional piece of art. They leave with a deeper understanding of rural Appalachian culture and the hardy, resourceful families who settled in and left an indelible mark on the region.

Ownbys put the ‘family’ in family business Like the Proffitts, the Ownbys of Ownby’s Woodcraft are inextricably intertwined with the community’s rich history. Janavee is the matriarch of both the family and their gallery, which she opened with her husband, Lum, close to 50 years ago. She’s proud to identify the beloved family members who live on in the faded photos scattered on the wall. One shows Lum’s home before it was torn down to allow for the creation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

At 84, the soft-spoken craftswoman still has a twinkle in her eye and an abiding passion for weaving white oak split baskets and herringbone-patterned chair seats. “When I was a little girl, we made what we needed,” Janavee says. “Baskets like those I make and sell here were used for carrying things like eggs. We’d trade them to buy whatever we couldn’t grow or make ourselves, such as sugar and coffee.”

While painstakingly weaving a chair seat, Janavee gets nostalgic, thinking back to her childhood when she sat quietly beside her grandmother intent on watching her make baskets. “She never taught; I just learned by watching.”

She learned to use corn shucks for caning chairs in the same manner. “I still remember the day she said she was going to use corn shucks for a chair seat. I said, ‘Grandma, how in the world can a corn shuck reach?’ I had no idea it could be twisted into one long rope. Those seats lasted forever as long as the cats or dogs didn’t start chewing on them.”

Daughter Jody Penny, who manages most of the store’s day-to-day operations, is Janavee’s right-hand woman. “So many of the people who come through are interested in our family’s history, which is so rewarding,” Jody says. “I talk about people I’ve never met, and yet I feel like I know them.

There’s my dad’s great-grandfather David Crocket Maples, who, in the 1800s, had to have both his feet sawed off because of frostbite. He made himself wooden feet and lived another 50 years.”

“All these years later,” her mom adds, “we’re still doing woodwork.”

Left: Janavee Ownby holding one of her handmade egg baskets.

Center: A young Lum Ownby with his grandmother Sally Compton and great-uncle Mack McCarter as they weave baskets. Right: At age 11, Jody Penny’s grandson Nate is already learning the family craft.

He proudly wove this treasured chair seat when he was only nine.

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Jody never questioned her role in the family business, which also includes her brother David.

Although David and Lum don’t work in the shop, Jody feels their presence. “They are the backbone of this shop, turning native wood into decorative heirlooms that people want to collect,” she says.

Jody was in her early 20s when she started working here. “I could do this and bring my daughter to work. She grew up here. I still have a basket she made here as a little girl. This is a business where you could bring the kids and grandkids and have the great experience of being with family.”

Whaleys carve father-to-son bond Quality time with family is also important to Randy and Scott Whaley, a father-and-son team who work at Whaley Handcrafts, which opened in the Glades in 1958. Their family history, dating back several generations, is also intimately woven into the fabric of the community. The shop was built adjacent to the tin-roof farm home where Randy’s mom, Augusta, grew up. His parents, the original proprietors, initially opened it to sell handwoven items.

“Both of my father’s parents were weavers as were their families before them,” Scott says. “My father and I learned to both weave and carve at a young age.”

One side of the retail space is devoted to traditionally patterned textiles created

by Randy’s cousin Hope, who still works on an old family loom.

Having worked so closely together over the years, Randy and Scott have developed a tag-team approach to carving and detailing personality-filled birds, bears and hillbillies in a closet-sized workroom barely large enough to accommodate the tools of their trade, let alone the companionable father and son.

Above: Randy Whaley holds an unfinished eagle, one of many creatures and creations taking shape in his workshop at Whaley Handcrafts. Above left: Randy Whaley’s father, Frank, still whittles simple, delicately beautiful flowers for the wooden vases at his son’s shop. Below left: A Northern Flicker showcases the detail and craftsmanship the Whaleys apply to their work, from the raw wood to the realistic painting that brings the final object to life.

“I’ve been helping out here my whole life,” Scott says.

“Although I’ve done a lot of different things off and on, for the last dozen years I’ve been working here full time. There aren’t many jobs where I’d get to work with my dad and papaw and mamaw.”

Randy readily explains the collaborative process: “I draw a pattern on paper before laying it down on the wood. If I end up doing that piece again, I’ll create a wood template.”

Using his bandsaw, guided by the wood’s grain, he skillfully brings his forest creations to life. Knives and chisels come next. Time and experience have taught him how deep to cut and how to turn the blade to animate his work. “I then turn it over to Scott who has a disc-shaped bit he uses to add the detailing and feather work before painting them.”

Like most wood artists in the area, the Whaleys have an abiding respect for the natural resource they use, working with downed trees, old barns or discarded fenceposts. While Scott occasionally finds pine knots to use as a base for their decorative sculptures, the bulk of their wood comes from locals who know exactly what they’re looking for.

Ogles sweep visitors off their feet Equally intent on gleaning what he needs from the land,

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Above left: David Ogle sews each broom with a flat metal tool fashioned from a bridge nail for the task by his grandfather Lee Ogle nearly 100 years ago. Above right: Boo the cat ‘stands guard’ on the porch beneath a collection of brooms waiting to be sewn outside Ogle’s Broom Shop. Right: Each Ogle broom is as unique as the wood selected for its handle.

broom-maker David Ogle and his wife Tammie plant 45 to 50 acres of broomcorn each year to craft the brooms for which the family is recognized. Their tiny studio and retail store, Ogle’s Broom Shop, is housed in a back room of Jim Gray’s Gallery on Glades Road.

Ogle’s ancestors were born in what is now the national park.

While his grandfather made corn-shuck mops, his great-uncle inspired the family’s broom-making tradition. “My papaw sold the first broom for a nickel to a surveyor working for the national park in the ’30s. That was a lot of money back then.”

Ogle began learning how to find the balance between broomcorn and handle at the tender age of nine. By age 13, when he wasn’t in school, he was making brooms to earn extra money. “This year marks my 49th year doing this full time,” he says proudly.

The brooms are as unique as the wood Ogle uses for each handle. “I think I’ve got a little bit of every kind of wood that grows in these mountains,” he says.

While his elders let the wood speak for itself, David enjoys embellishing many of the brooms

with carvings of wizened faces he considers to be ancestors. “No two handles are alike, which is why people collect them.”

Ogle promotes himself as a third-generation craftsman, although he realizes he’s technically the fourth because his great-grandfather also made brooms. “He didn’t sell them, though. He took them to town to trade for what the family needed,” Ogle says.

While it currently attracts new and experienced artisans from around the country with class offerings in woodworking, ceramics, glass blowing and more, it had far more humble beginnings in the early 1900s catering to the education of the area’s rural children.

Frances Fox, a local weaver who is not only a member of the arts and crafts community but also a historian who has spent years passionately compiling the colorful history of Arrowmont, loves sharing stories of the settlement school, as it was originally known.

“It was founded in 1912 by the Pi Beta Phi sorority of Illinois-based Monmouth College,” she says. “The settlement school philosophy was to teach people to celebrate their Scots-Irish heritage, as well as improve their livelihood in these mountains by producing and selling the things their parents and grandparents were making.”

That desire to help residents sell their work wasn’t just talk. In 1917, individual Pi Phi alumni clubs across the country began selling community members’ baskets. After the school hired a teacher to create a formal

Settlement school helps to shape an economy The Ogle and the Ownby families were certainly not the only ones to barter what they made for what they needed. The Proffitts and Whaleys as well as other craftspeople with long family ties to the community all share similar stories. What many of them also have in common is the settlement school that helped the community transform a barter economy into sustainable businesses.

If you’ve never heard of the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, chances are you won’t notice it located slightly up the hill from traffic lights four and five in downtown Gatlinburg.

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Left: Weaver and historian Frances Fox shows one of the handmade, traditional-style chairs from the dining room at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. The chair features a corn shuck seat and dates back to the early days of the craft movement in Gatlinburg. Fox attended Pi Beta Phi Settlement School as a child, returned as an adult to apprentice for the master weaver, and volunteers her time at Arrowmont sharing the history of the school. Below: Charles Ray Huskey, who also attended the settlement school, holds two of his trademark birdhouse Christmas ornaments. Right: Chris Compton demonstrates carving a graceful motif onto a wooden vase at his Wood Whittlers shop. Bottom left: Fan pulls created by Charles Ray Huskey.

weaving program, it opened Arrowcraft, the school’s retail sales shop, in 1926.

“When the shop first opened, people didn’t understand the concept of consignment, so the Pi Phis bought their work outright,” Frances says. “The Pi Phis also set standards.

The work had to be made of high enough quality suitable for selling, rather than bartering.” Arrowcraft also employed local weavers whose work was sold across the country.

Frances, who along with her mother and siblings attended the settlement school, is proud to be part of its rich history. “My mom’s mom wove for Arrowcraft,” she says. “Although I left Gatlinburg for many years, I became an apprentice to the master weaver here when I returned.

There were some 80 weavers employed by Arrowcraft at the time. Part of what contributed to the shop’s success was the national park, which brought in countless visitors each year.”

“In 1967, the school board notified the Pi Beta Phi’s settlement school board it wanted to take over the education portion of the school,” Frances says.

“They wanted to build a new elementary school and consolidate the high schools.

At that point, Pi Beta Phi formed a new board for the art school and named it Arrowmont. The main

building was finished and dedicated in 1970.”

Like Frances, woodworker Charles Ray Huskey has fond memories of the settlement school where his father also served as the woodshop teacher. “Because I lived six miles out of town, I stayed in the dorm,” he recalls. “I worked there, too, doing maintenance during the summer. Once I got to know the instructors, they provided me with materials and let me join in their night art classes. Going to school there had a big impact on my craft.”

Huskey was also influenced by his parents who owned the Village Craft Shop. “Everyone in the family pitched in,” he says. “Even when I was little, I helped carry shavings out.”

Huskey was only eight when the Southern Highland Craft Guild had its first show in Gatlinburg. “Right then I remember being fascinated and never thought about doing anything else. I started selling things in the shop when I was 12. The first things I remember making were roosters from rhododendron wood.”

Not one to toot his own horn, Huskey will likely fail to mention the documentary created by the 10,000-member American Association of Woodturners to honor his work.

Although he sold the shop to ease out of full-time woodworking, the original shop sign still hangs in Huskey’s home studio. His trademark Christmas ornaments and fan pulls can be found at HighLand Craft Gallery on Buckhorn Road.

Woodworker Chris Compton has also cut back on his work. His family’s business, Wood Whittlers, sits on Highway 321, just across from the Glades Road entrance to the craft community loop. Don’t be fooled by the

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Find the artists online

simple exterior. Inside is a wonderfully earthy collection of handcrafted furniture and carvings fashioned from a wide variety of woods by Compton, his family members and other local artisans.

The Compton family also benefited from the settlement school. Compton’s father and uncle Shirl and Clay learned to make colonial reproduction-style furniture from respected woodcrafter O. J. Mattil, who was brought to the settlement school to direct the woodcraft shop. When Mattil left the school and opened Woodcrafters and Carvers in the early ’30s, the two brothers gained experience working there.

“This year marks our 75th anniversary,” Chris says. “We’re one of the oldest retailers in Gatlinburg.”

Chris says his father opened the shop after returning from a stint working on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge during World War II. “In the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, my family produced custom furniture. By the late ’60s, though, we could no longer compete with the manufacturers.”

Survival meant rolling with the changes. The shop no longer has employees but artisans, many of whom use the shop’s equipment to create their wares.

“I love to turn a beautiful piece of wood into something people appreciate,” Chris says.

As much as he enjoys creating lamps and vases, he is most passionate about crafting one-of-a-kind live-edged tables from hard-to-come-by burled wood. The lustrous finishes are the result of applying 20 (yes, 20!) coats of clear lacquer at the end of the process.

Despite the years devoted to his craft, Chris likes to say he’s never worked a day in his life. Soon-to-be son-in-law Brad Craig helps in the shop and has become enamored of the family legacy. Given his enthusiasm and penchant for learning, chances are great he will work his way into the business, ensuring the tradition lives on. v

Great Smoky Arts and Crafts Community 668 Glades Road gatlinburgcrafts.com Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts 556 Parkway arrowmont.org Ogle’s Broom Shop 670 Glades Road oglesbrooms.com Ownby’s Woodcraft 704 Glades Road gatlinburg.com/listing/ ownbys-woodcraft Proffitt’s Woodworks 3615 Lindsey Mill Road proffitts-woodworks.com Whaley Handcrafts 688 Glades Road Wood Whittlers 1402 East Parkway, #6 HighLand Craft Gallery 755 Buckhorn Road gatlinburg.com/listing/ highland-craft-gallery All are also on Facebook

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