The House That Carving Built

An expert woodcarver can take a block of wood and make it look alive. The Brasstown Carvers of the John C. Campbell Folk School, tucked back in the westernmost part of North Carolina, are among some of the best. They had dwindled down to just a handful when Richard Carter started teaching a new generation of carvers through free night classes in 2017. A beginner who spent last summer at the Folk School, shares this appreciation — not only of carving but of the non-competitive and life-giving work he learned there.

Story by Robert Grand | Photographs by Fernando Decillis

September 1, 2020

Richard Carter, one of the few Brasstown Carvers, started teaching free weekly carving classes in 2017. Carter started working at the Folk School’s dairy farm in the late ‘60s (when agriculture was still a core part of the curriculum). His childhood passion of carving was revitalized after taking lessons from noted Carver Jack Hall and, later on, Helen Gibson. He’s pictured here on his front porch, working on a frog.

I met Carter my second day at Campbell, a few minutes after reporting to the Folk School office for my first day on the “job” (but more about that later). He came knocking, and Darcy Holdorf, the Folk School’s then-Outreach Coordinator and my supervisor at the time, enthusiastically introduced us. “This is one of the new work studies,” she told him, turning toward me, “Richard’s one of the Brasstown Carvers; I’m sure you’ll see him a lot around here.”

I hadn’t been there long, but had heard plenty about the legacy of the Carvers. A substantial portion of the school’s History Center, a living-room sized museum across from Keith, detailed the Carvers’ almost hundred-year existence. I admired their handiwork during supper too, as the dining hall is lined with glass display cases featuring dozens of carvings and photos of some of the original classes — students whittling together around a picnic table or carving while balancing on a fence post. I knew Campbell was imbued with so much history, but the Carvers, to me, were a tangible, material marker of it — so much so that I assumed their presence was a relic, the practitioners long gone. 

And yet, here was an active carver standing right in front of me. Old fashioned as all get-out, with his Folk School t-shirt tucked into straight-leg blue jeans, his face obscured by an old ball cap and large-frame, aviator-like glasses. “Good deal, good deal,” Carter said, nodding his head in my direction. He continued on, his tone jovial and engaging, but his words hard to fully understand. Carter had a mountain accent, sure, but he was also incredibly soft-spoken. Seemed like the kind of good-natured, genuine guy who would eschew any compliment or admiration thrown his way. The city boy in me couldn’t comprehend it. 

As he turned to go, he looked toward me. “We’ll be down in Keith House this week. You oughta come by and carve for a little bit.”

“I’d love to!” I responded, thrilled to see the tradition in action. “I’ll probably just watch, though. Not too good with my hands.”

“That’s okay,” he said, making his way down the office stairs. “Plenty of beginners there. We’ll help you out.”

Long before I pulled into Campbell that summer, I was ready for an escape. 2019 was turning into one of those years I’d want to permanently block out as soon as it passed, and I didn’t think much else could change its course. 

Earlier that year, I celebrated my fifth year in New York City by hunting for a new apartment. My partner and I split a couple weeks prior, after four and a half years together, and I was scrambling to find a place I could afford closeby. 

I settled into a dream of a place when I got the call. Mom wasn’t feeling great, and after some poking around, the doctors found something in her lungs. 

I flew home to South Carolina immediately. I sat by her side as the specialist diagnosed her with Stage IV lung cancer. Together we outlined a treatment strategy, a dismal chemo calendar, but it didn’t matter much - after a botched procedure, she ended up in the ICU and passed a week later. I was lucky enough to be there for her final moments, holding one hand as she flicked off the nurse with her other, upset that he was messing with her ventilator yet again. 

I came back to New York after the funeral and a week of grieving (as if such feelings could be compounded into this short spurt of time), and found that the Big Apple had lost all of its charm. I’d cry openly on the subway, feeling the pull to be back down South as the train inched into Manhattan. Close friends supported my idea, of course, but kept asking, “What would you do there?” 

I thought back to that day I left the hospital for the final time, when my cousin, Jill, walked me to the parking lot. We hugged goodbye, and she pulled a Folk School catalog out of her bag and dropped it into my own tote full of Mom’s personal belongings. “I’ll just leave this here,” she said, “in case you wanted to take a look, come visit for a week or two.”

Jill had moved to nearby Blairsville in 2003 for work and heard about the Folk School her first day on the job. She started taking fiddle lessons from local musician and lifelong country boy, Mike Robinson, whose family started attending classes and contra dances at Campbell in 1985. The two married in 2008, had the ceremony on campus, and said their vows in the main room of Keith House. (“Above our very heads!” I’d say to friends in the carving class.)

I had always been intrigued by the school, but the timing never felt quite right. Neither did the expense, until I saw a small-print paragraph on the last page of the catalog. I couldn’t believe what I was reading; if accepted into the school’s work-study program, you’d receive full tuition for four weeks of classes, room and board, and three meals a day in exchange for five weeks of labor. No cost at all, except the gas to get there. 

I was desperate for the chance. The mysterious, too good to be true program would give me a definitive answer to my friends’ looming question as well as the time to heal. I’d be close to family too, a drive away from Dad. Maybe I’d pick up the guitar again, learn some old folk songs. Write fiction while lying on a grassy knoll underneath some apple trees. 

I applied for one of the office positions, and waited with baited breath to hear back. Once I was accepted, I figured I’d dive in headfirst. Say yes to anything, in the hopes that the Folk School’s non-competitive energy and bountiful opportunities would help me truly recenter myself and find joy again.

When I came down to the basement that first Thursday evening, I noticed that the faces there were different from the ones I’d seen around campus. Carter’s class brings together a mix of locals, Folk School staff, and friends from off. They come to carve, but also to discuss the local gossip, compare family dramas, or share stories. I am quickly roped into conversations. In a back and forth about oddly-named towns, one carver said he lived in a part of the mountain called Smackass Gap. (I looked it up, and yep, it sits right outside Hayesville, North Carolina.) Another woman moved here after her partner, a photojournalist, was hired by the local paper but turned down an assignment to photograph the landslide near the Nantahala Gorge a week before because, as he told his editor, “I’m at a rasslin’ tournament, and you won’t believe it, but the Mayor of Andrews just jumped into the ring.”

As the night went on, it started to feel like the word “class” was too rigid to describe what was actually happening in this somewhat cramped basement. As we whittled away, Carter didn’t stand at the front, lecture or demand his students’ undivided attention. Instead, he made his way around the room and offered one-on-one feedback and a helping hand. Occasionally, other longtime Brasstown Carvers, including Carolyn Anderson and Helen Gibson, would join him, lending their expertise to the amateurs in attendance. (Gibson’s even written a handful of books teaching others how to carve in the Brasstown style.)

Carter prepares simple animal figure blanks for carving students, using the same basic templates as generations of Brasstown Carvers before him.

Carter helped me pick out a block and tools (all free, by the way - there’s no charge for the class, the blanks, or to rent the equipment either) but it was Anderson who caught me struggling. I chose an owl pattern - too complicated for a beginning carver. It was quite the battle to apply Carter’s instruction to my own grisly blank; I had rounded out the back of its head well enough, but couldn’t clear out a solid notch to separate its cheeks from its shoulders.

“Oh, you poor thing,” Anderson said, waving over Carter. “You gotta help this boy, Richard, he’s trying for an owl,” she said, in a way that was more caring than condescending. “Do you have your squirt bottle?” she asked, referring to a special solution Carvers use to soften the wood and make it easier to shape. (After searching for a place to buy the stuff, I learned it’s just half rubbing alcohol and half water.)

Carter came over, took my sloppy attempt and, with ease, chipped out the whole left side of its face, walking me through each step as he not only fixed my gnarly division but formed one of the owl’s eyes and half of his beak. I spent the rest of the night struggling, but in that moment, watching Carter’s hands gracefully chisel away the wood like cheese off a block, I believed I could get it down pat.

The John C. Campbell Folk School was founded in 1925 and the Brasstown Carvers came together soon after. Story goes that school co-founder Olive Dame Campbell saw a group of men whittling outside Scroggs’ General Store and was charmed — until she realized the wood they were shaving came from the bench right underneath their backsides. Store owner Fred O. Scroggs had already tried solving the problem, hammering nails into the sides and the ends of the bench to stop the vandals, but it didn’t help much; the men would just knick around them, hollowing out the narrow gaps between the nails. 

Campbell, having recently opened the Folk School as an alternative to established models of higher education for the local farming community, was determined to transform the men’s idle whittling into an empowering skill. It was one of the many aspects of the Folk School’s curriculum that prioritized non-competitive learning and personal enrichment above all, loosely adapted from the Danish model of a folkehojskole. By the summer of 1930, the school had a full-time carving class on the roster and began marketing and selling their students’ creations — as long as they stood up to the faculty’s high standard.

A saving grace at the onset of the Great Depression, carving sales flourished thanks to a slew of distribution agreements; carvings from Brasstown were consigned to 48 shops across the country, including ones run by the Southern Highlanders, a TVA-led initiative meant to usher in a new phase of economic development. The Southern Highlanders, thanks to subsidies from the TVA and help from stockholders like Campbell Folk School among others, operated storefronts in rural Tennessee and in the lobby of New York City’s Rockefeller Center; the group produced a mail-order catalog as well. 

Additionally, in 1933, the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild, a separate but similar organization, sponsored an exhibition of Appalachian-made artisan objects in the nation’s capital; it was here that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt acquired a flock of geese believed to be carved by one of Brasstown’s finest. And that wasn’t the end of her collection — afterward, she reached out to the Folk School directly and bought more of the alluring animal carvings to decorate the White House. She even gave one to Queen Elizabeth; she was Princess Elizabeth, at the time, but it was an honor to the small community nonetheless.

This carving of a goat is in the dining hall display case from a box of carvings marked 'unknown'.

There’s a whole cast of carvers that left their mark on the program, but when talking to current practitioners and those familiar with its history, the name Murrial Decker Martin comes up again and again. Martin, an accomplished weaver, was hired by Olive Dame Campbell in 1940 to oversee a litany of craft programs at Campbell — but, soon after, she became the de facto head of carving. She ran a tight ship, some would say too tight, by establishing a syllabus, refining the carver’s way of working, and raising the school’s already high standards for sellable pieces; she’d joke that a student “...would wear out his carving carrying it around in his pocket before I would accept it.” Her classes, like the new night classes, sought to engage the wider Brasstown community and were free and open to all. 

Murray, as students called her, stressed the importance of working from life; her motto was “carve what you know.” She encouraged students to carve depictions of livestock, to look towards their family farms for inspiration. Sometimes she would even bring in a live pig or rooster to class, plopping it down onto the carving table and encouraging her students to study the creature’s proportions from all angles. And sometimes her advice was more poetic than practical; one student was told to make their rabbit carving “look like it is just taking a breath and about to take another one.” 

Murray also helped design the patterns for the Carver’s popular Nativity scenes. Instead of being sold as a complete set, these creche figures were purchased on a subscription basis, with a new one coming to the buyer every few months. Rarely were all the scene’s pieces whittled by the same carver, leading the community to share the workload and the profits that came along with it. 

Students greatly admired Murray, not only for the skills she helped them discover and refine, but for the possibilities that carving brought to them. “Not every mother can stay home, look after her children, and make as much money as I have in the last three years,” wrote local Sue McClure in a letter to Murray from 1947. 

John H. Hall, Jack’s uncle and the self-proclaimed “oldest carver,” who started whittling at 74, wrote to Murray around the same time, detailing how the craft gave him a new way forward after farming and other hard labor proved to be too strenuous. “I had at that time wondered how I could ever make a minimum income,” he wrote. Carvers like Hall went on to make wages that often surpassed their farming income, and they used their earnings to support their families or pay off outstanding medical expenses. 

Hayden and Bonnie Logan Hensley, two of the most prolific and popular carvers in Brasstown, were able to buy a house with their whittling revenue sometime in the 1940s. They lived there until they passed in 2001, telling their friends it was “the house that carving built.”

Gallery (click arrows to view): Sally & Clarence Fleming (ca. 1940); Carvers at work on small animal figures and napkin rings ca. 1940;  The hands on the right belong to Olive Dame Campbell, founder of the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, N.C. The hands on the left belong to John Jacob Niles, who accompanied Ulmann to Brasstown and later returned to serve as music director at the Folk School in 1935. A hand-woven coverlet appears in the background (Photo by Doris Ulmann, 1933); Hayden Hensley and wife, Bonnie Logan Hensley both Brasstown Carvers, (1960). Photos courtesy of the John C. Campbell Folk School.

More than the money or the opportunities that carving brought the citizens of Brasstown, many, in letters to Murray, emphasized the joy they felt when making. Classes became a real social hour for all involved, cultivating deep and lifelong friendships among students and teachers. Hall described looking forward to upcoming classes, to “passing many happy hours with more of my good friends and neighbors.” McClure wrote how excited she was to see Martin and the gang that weekend, adding that, although she’d only been away for three weeks, it felt like years.

Sometimes the joy was a consolation during uncertain times, when fear and despair led people to turn inward, closing their curtains to the outside world. Murray led the carving program through World War II, one of the more trying times for this small community, and Fannie Ivester was grateful for the distraction. “While my son was in the South Pacific,” she wrote to Murray, “I passed the hours away sitting carving and praying for the awful war to end.”

Martin’s way of teaching may be stylistically different from what takes place today (Carter hasn’t brought any live animals to the table — yet), but the carving classes at Campbell have always shared the same spirit, inspiring a sense of purpose, camaraderie, and belonging among those in attendance. This quote, from a 1940s brochure describing the Brasstown Carvers, is almost as applicable today as it was back then:

Some of the most pleasant days of the week are those when different groups bring in their finished work and get new blocks. Such weekly occasions might be called classes, as each carving is examined and improvements made if necessary, but they are more in the nature of study groups or social gatherings. Whittling around the table affords an excellent chance for discussion which varies between international to local problems of health, civic welfare, Church and home. [...] A prominent sociologist, after sitting in on one of those meetings said, “That is one of the finest pieces of social work I’ve ever seen.”

These days, carving isn’t as monetarily lucrative as it once was. The Folk School’s Craft Shop is the only store in the world to carry new inventory from the Brasstown Carvers, and the whittlers bring in their wares maybe once or twice a month. (Older carvings are sometimes found in local antique shops or Southern auction houses; every few months one will appear on eBay, ending in a fierce bidding war.) This exclusivity is more about supply than demand. In an interview with local radio station WKRK, Mary Doornbos, who was the craft shop’s manager at the time, remarked, “For many years we would sell them to other Southern Highland Craft Guild shops,” the same ones that brought attention to the Carvers in the early years. “But,” she hesitated, “we do not have enough Carvers right now to support any kind of wholesale.”

The Carvers have always been part of Campbell, intertwined into the fabric of the school’s identity — one that’s enlivening, community-based and approachable, where students and teachers are strictly on a first-name basis with one another. And yet, before swift change a few years ago, the dwindling cohort and craft itself were hanging on by a thread. 

The Carvers’ revitalization is mostly thanks to Jerry Jackson, who became the school’s executive director in 2017. He took the partnership between Campbell and the Carvers to new heights, recognizing the power of its history and the importance of sustaining this tradition, one as old as the school itself. He hired Carter as a contract employee, offered the school’s facilities and full support to the Carvers, and, along with Carter and Doornbos, hatched the plan for a consistent weekly workshop. 

The Thursday class isn’t always in the bottom of Keith; curiously, the Carving class doesn't have a dedicated studio on the school’s 300-acre campus. Due to increased interest, dormitories are constantly at capacity and so are the small number of dedicated studios, forcing a number of classes, Carter’s included, to improvise based on what’s available. 

The Woodcarving Studio is especially hard to get, often in use by one of the school’s tuition-based classes and therefore unavailable to Richard. (Not to mention, with over thirty students on a good week, his carving class is almost too big for the room to hold.) “We’ve been lucky for the past couple months to get the bottom of the Keith House,” Carter told me when I asked him about it earlier this year. Having a permanent workroom, and a dedicated set-up, would not just make things easier for the students and Carter, but, as he told me in these later conversations, it would save so much time.

Time put to better use, because the more I got to know Carter, stopping to chat when I’d see him whittling in the craft shop or while walking from studio to studio, the more I learned just how many hours a week he put into keeping this tradition alive. On the days when he was working at the school as a contract employee, maybe two or three times a week, he would wake up early, grab a load of basswood from his personal storage unit and head over to Campbell to prepare the blanks — blocky, often palm-sized silhouettes of plants, animals, and other objects that students new to the course will spend weeks whittling down. 

Simplicity is the Carvers’ calling card, though; when finished, their animals have a minimal amount of identifying markings, and their surfaces are sleek and glossy, sanded down to such a degree that they catch the light in a way that feels impossible for wood. The patterns for these blanks have been, “used since the Folk School began,” Carter told me, “but they’ve been redone several times.” Most of what’s used today was devised by the late Hope Brown, who started carving with the crew in 1940. (Her son, Hoyt Brown, is still a Brasstown Carver.)

Using a table saw and a bandsaw, Carter will cut along the guidelines from passed-down blocks of wood or older sheets of cardboard, switching to a coping saw to shape the more detailed grooves, or to a drill if he’s making napkin rings and needs to hollow out their middles. He does all this intensive work in his “shop” on campus — a few woodworking staples set up in a nook of the school’s maintenance shed; “my little corner,” he calls it. It can take five or six hours to go from raw wood to ready-to-carve, and while Carter admits that he spreads the workload out across the week, the process still, “takes a lot longer than people think.”

The biggest hurdle, though, was finding a set of pupils who’d be able to attend a campus workshop for the long term. Most classes at Campbell are taught by renowned artisans who, along with their students, come to Brasstown once, maybe twice, a year for a week-long session. There’s a big range in the school’s offerings, but most courses are meant to help first-timers get their feet wet, sending them home with a new sense of pride and enough skill to turn a cursory interest into a bonafide (and perhaps profitable) hobby. Also, the Folk School’s classes can be a significant financial commitment, costing around $600 per course, a price that’s often prohibitive for the local, working-class neighbors who call the enchanted valley home. The school has offered scholarships and local standby rates to combat this, but still, it’s not ideal for the kind of sustained engagement that being a Brasstown Carver requires.

Carter’s first class, then, was originally held after-hours for Campbell’s work-study students, who, like me, would be around for a few months at a time. The exact number varies, but the school tries to enroll between four to six work-study students per “session,” or nine-week  grouping. The calendar’s set so our sessions overlap with one another, doubling the workforce and smoothing the transition between groups, in the hopes that the old guard will teach newcomers the way of the land.

From the first five work study students that showed up for a mini-lesson, attendance mushroomed organically — work-study students told others around the school, older Carvers spread the word among locals, and Carter went from classroom to classroom around campus every week, inviting those who were curious to come on over. Some were interested in woodcarving and others just wanted to see what all the fuss was about - something that had to be curtailed a bit as the class gained popularity. I invited another student to Carter’s Carving Night during supper one evening and a veteran of the school, sitting nearby, chimed in - “You know, it’s not something we tell many visitors about,” she chided me. “Last time we made a big show of it, people had to line up outside the studio and Richard ran out of wood.” Some things are too good to keep quiet about, though.

It doesn’t hurt that the carving sessions are free and run late into the evening, convening after most businesses in Brasstown have closed for the day. As one student told me, it’s easy to corral others, convince them to drop in when not much else was going on. “People will say, ‘What are you doing Thursday night?’ Oh, I’m going to carving. ‘Carving?” she mimicked, raising the pitch of her voice dramatically. “Where’s carving?”

I was surprised to see Shiloh Thomas at one of my last carving classes before my session was set to end. She worked in the school’s craft shop during the day, and while I’d seen her all around campus and become her friend, we’d never crossed paths in the Keith House basement. I was even more surprised to see the handful of perfectly-carved cats perched in front of her, each one being the fruit of her own labor.

Thomas, now in her late twenties, is one of the club’s younger whittlers. (Not the youngest, mind you — there are some 10-year olds who are well on their way to becoming old pros, Carter tells me.) She moved here from Florida a couple of years ago after hearing about the Folk School from siblings, teachers, and friends, and immersed herself into the culture almost as soon as her boxes were unpacked. She crochets, knits, plays the fiddle, bakes excellent pies, and is one of the Brasstown Morris Dancers — a troupe that performs English folk dances with a North Carolina twist. 

Before Carter’s class, Thomas had no prior carving experience, “except for, you know, when I was a kid with my pocket knife,” she said, reminiscing about shaving down the branches that fell from nearby trees. Thomas came to the carving club by chance, and with help from Carter and the rest of the gang, she’s gone from novice to near-professional in less than a year. 

“She came up right quick,” Carter told me, adding that she’s swiftly on her way to becoming the newest official Brasstown Carver. Doing so means she’ll partner with the school’s craft shop to sell her wares and will pledge to produce a steady amount of product for the store and collectors alike.

Mostly, Thomas carves cats — originally based on the Carvers’ patterns, but now primarily of her own design. In the beginning, she heard her teachers echo Murray’s old motto, to “carve what you know,” and she took that to heart as her skills progressed.

“I’ve always had cats, ever since I was a little girl, so I have a pretty good idea of what a cat should look like,” she told me with a laugh. Each one of her felines takes about six hours to carve out, not including sanding and finishing — and, seeing as she doesn’t have much time outside of the Thursday night sessions, it can take her three or four weeks to finish one. 

Thomas still has some hoops to jump through, a strict set of criteria to meet before Carter and the others name her an official carver. She has to present five or six consistent carvings of the same animal, another handful of napkin rings, and sign some paperwork and consignment agreements. We didn’t discuss details of pricing but she wasn’t too concerned. Like the generations of carvers before her, financial gain is not a motivating factor or the main appeal - but it doesn’t hurt either.

Carter assured me that, even with the strict criteria and “tests” to be administered, Thomas is just about there. He’s enthusiastic about the possibility, too; if she continues on this path, Thomas would be the second official Brasstown Carver to come from his class — Terence Faries, who picked up the craft after retiring in Murphy a couple of years ago, being the first.

When I was at Campbell, I never tagged along with Carter on his working days or spent much time on my own carvings. I was either busy with office duties or other studio classes, and, as time flew by, I didn’t think much of it. After all, I knew I’d never be a capital-C Carver; I was enjoying my time at the Thursday night sessions, but my technique wasn’t getting much better — more so because of my own ornery attitude than Carter’s instruction. 

I soon ditched the owl I was working on and started rounding out a mushroom, but Carter told me that would be too difficult a pattern as well. He suggested I start with an evergreen tree, which I also happily abandoned after an hour or so. Something in my brain wasn’t grasping working with wood in general, and it felt silly to waste my time on a carving that would symbolically mean nothing to me. I was hungry for results, something to wow my friends up North, and fell into my worst habits — becoming the quiet, determined perfectionist who wouldn’t settle for anything less than ideal. 

This philosophy spilled into my other Folk School classes as well. Sometimes it led to a magical and beneficial experience — like the cooking class where the instructor, sensing my willingness and determination but also my underlying nerves and self-doubt, assigned me to a role on every dish we made that week. I was stunned and overjoyed when my peach jam, made from scratch with produce fresh from the garden, tasted better than the pricey, all-natural jars I’d tried before. Or when I learned how to make fried okra, a dish I always thought I’d have to drive down to Cracker Barrel to properly enjoy. 

More often than not, though, this attitude would get me into trouble. There was the woodturning class where my project, a rounded Christmas ornament, kept flying off the lathe due to my carelessness and frustration. (“I think it’s time to call it a day,” the instructor told me two-and-a-half hours before class was set to end.) There was the writing class where I forced everyone to help me revise the same dry, underdeveloped short story, determined not to move on until I could mark it as ready to publish.

Early this year, drivers were still kicking up red clay, drawing big crowds at the Tri-County Racetrack, and gamblers continued to bet against the house at the Harrah’s Casino in nearby Murphy. The turning point came that second week of March, as the CDC’s recommendation for appropriate crowd sizes dwindled from 500, 200, then down to 100 in a matter of days. Campbell closed that Friday, suspending all classes and events for a few months. (The school recently decided to close for the rest of the year.) With their decision, a new reality started to set in; the citizens of Brasstown would have to come to terms with the fact that COVID-19’s impact would be felt beyond the big, faraway cities of New York, Los Angeles, or hell, even Atlanta. 

I called Carter in early April. Throughout our conversation, with each rhetorical question he posed to me, I could hear the sadness and frustration building in his voice. Would the carving class congregate somewhere else in town? Would they even be able to meet if the virus ramped up? His students were dedicated, coming to every workshop and carving there for at least an hour or two at a time — but now what? Would they lose interest in the class, or, God forbid, the craft overall, after such a long-standing break?

I was despondent as well — I had hoped to come back to Brasstown this summer for a short vacation and started planning the getaway in my mind.  

As the crisis drags on, answers are harder to come by, optimism hard to maintain — especially in the area surrounding the Folk School. Cherokee County, North Carolina, saw more than twenty cases by the time May began, significantly more than the number in any bordering county, and like most of the U.S. early on, completely shut down in the face of it. (As of late August, the county has seen 412 total cases, including 19 non-residents who tested positive while in the county.)

The Carvers are no stranger to hardships; throughout history, they’ve proved resilient, and, in fact, have often thrived in times of economic uncertainty and nationwide unrest. With their mix of ingenuity, folklore, and down-home craftsmanship, one hopes this period will be no different, and that their unbreakable spirit will help one another and the wider Brasstown community weather this storm.

Carter whittles a frog and other animals on his porch, waiting for the pandemic to pass and classes to open back up again.

For now, each Carver is keeping active, figuring out the best way through it all. Shiloh Thomas was furloughed from her job at the Folk School in July and has moved back home to Florida for the time being. She’s helping her cousins with remote learning (a range of ages, with the youngest in a virtual Pre-K) but is still carving in her spare time. In an attempt to move beyond felines, she just finished her first bear.

Carter’s been spending more time with his grandchildren and ramping up his landscaping business, now that his contract position at the Folk School is in flux. He’s dying to get back to his students, though. Darcy Holdorf, my old supervisor who introduced me to Carter, is now Programs Director at Campbell and, earlier this year, helped him set up a Facebook group for the Carvers and their friends. It’s still pretty sparse but activity has ramped up since COVID-19 took hold. Carter doesn’t post tutorials or host a virtual version of the carving club (some things are better in person). He does, however, share the occasional photo of his grandchildren or comments on carvings-in-progress by fellow members, ending every one of his posts with a heartfelt “miss you all.”

The Carvers will pick up and start again, surely, but there’s no use in worrying about what the future holds just yet. I think back to what Avery Beaver, one of the original Carvers, told Murray as the country was finally recovering from the Great Depression. “I take each day as it’s handed out to me.”

The Craft Shop at the John C. Campbell Folk School sells carvings by Brasstown’s finest, along with a number of books by Helen Gibson teaching how to carve in the Brasstown style. More information, including hours and contact information, can be found on their website.

Robert Alan Grand is a writer and curator based in Queens, New York. His writings have appeared in Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Burnaway, and Natasha, among others. Grand was one of the co-founders and co-directors of Kimberly-Klark, an interdisciplinary project space.

Fernando Decillis is an Atlanta-based photographer specializing in advertising and documentary projects. He has worked on campaigns for Coca-Cola, Wild Turkey Bourbon, and many more. His work has been featured in publications such as AdWeek, Smithsonian Magazine, CNN & Bloomberg Businessweek. In 2015 Fernando was honored by the International Photography Awards with the title of Advertising Photographer of the Year and won a Communication Arts Award of Excellence.

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