Folk school operates a time machine

Is time travel possible? Of course! On this matter, you’d be wise to consult not physicists but artists — including the faculty of a certain highland school that once existed in a time all its own.

No, it wasn’t nestled inside Brigadoon. I refer to the John C. Campbell Folk School in beautiful Brasstown, North Carolina, which straddles the boundary between Clay and Cherokee counties.

When the United States was initially divided into four standard time zones in 1883, the far western corner of our state lay within Central Time. Over the ensuing decades, many communities voted to join the rest of North Carolina in observing Eastern Time. Clay County was one of them. Cherokee wasn’t. So the folks in Brasstown decided to split the difference. When it was 4 o’clock in Hayesville and 3 o’clock in Murphy, the clock at Campbell Folk School read 3:30!

Speaking of time, this fall marks the 100th anniversary of the school’s founding. Olive Dame Campbell, the widow of scholar John C. Campbell, incorporated the institution in late 1925with her friend Marguerite Butler, a Kentucky schoolteacher. Residents of Brasstown and neighboring communities contributed land, labor, and resources to the emerging folk school, a form of education borrowed from Northern Europe that imparts knowledge and skills without conferring grades or credentials.

Campbell Folk School is, in fact, the oldest and largest such institution in the United States, serving thousands of students and tens of thousands of visitors annually with weeklong and weekend classes, longer work-study programs for young people, and hundreds of concerts and dances a year for everyone.

What can you study at the folk school? Here’s a partial list: music, dance, gardening, quilting, photography, weaving, marbling, storytelling, painting, and puppetry. Fair warning, though: don’t expect to spend much of your time in classrooms listening to lectures. Campbell is very much a learn-by-doing school. Its motto? “We sing behind the plow.”

It was, indeed, sound that Olive Campbell used to describe what she had in mind. “We listen to sound of hammer,” she wrote, to “saw and plane in the carpentry room, to the thud of the loom and whirr of spinning wheel in the weaving and sewing room. We watch them at their daily physical training in the gymnasium. We hear them singing — for it is song that welds the group.”

Bethany Chaney, executive director of Campbell Folk School, relishes the opportunity to honor its past while serving new generations.

“We are this anchor here in far western North Carolina,” she told my Carolina Journal colleague Katherine Zender, “and because so few of us who’ve grown up in North Carolina ever get out here, we may not know what an incredibly special, beautiful, vibrant 100-year-old institution we have and how the folk school has changed people’s lives, perspectives, and even vocations.”

The school just completed its Fall Festival and is now preparing to host its Forge After Dark event, which will feature a blacksmithing demonstration and live music on Nov. 7 and a craft auction on Nov. 8.

No, you won’t find a mysterious TARDIS or souped-up DeLorean in Brasstown. Still, the kind of time travel practiced there is no less powerful and exciting. By teaching the fine arts, agricultural practices, foodways, and traditional culture of the Southern Appalachians, the John C. Campbell Folk School spirits its students and visitors away to a rich and deservedly cherished past.

At the same time, teacher and learner alike are building a bridge to a brighter future, one dedicated to the proposition that, as Olive Campbell put it, “education should not discredit” the “humble tasks of farm, shop and home.” Education should link “the culture of toil and culture of books,” she continued. “It should be enlightened action.”

Now, in our seemingly perpetual winter of discontent and disconnection, it’s a promise that beckons us with convivial warmth and glorious light — both available in ample quantities in Brasstown, at a time of your choosing.

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy and American history.