Rural Life and Culture in the Upper Cumberland

14. Made on the Mountain

246 W. CALVIN DICKINSON AND MICHAEL E. BIRDWELL 246 Chapter 14 MADE ON THE MOUNTAIN Upper Cumberland Arts and Crafts W. CALVIN DICKINSON AND MICHAEL E. BIRDWELL In Tennessee and Kentucky, crafts played a larger role than the fine arts in the history of culture. Craftsmen produced notable work in wood, clay, and fibers. During the period before contact with Europeans, Native Americans engaged in the creation of utilitarian crafts and ceremonial art objects. Perhaps the best known objects still found throughout the Upper Cumberland are the myriad flint arrow and spear points. Clovis points of varying description have been found in rock shelters, recently plowed fields, and along streams and river banks. Numerous mounds dot the landscape of the Upper Cumberland from the Woodland and Mississippian periods and have revealed pottery, weavings, various stone tools, and ceremonial art. Effigies of animals carved in stone and in stylized drawings represent some of the earliest art from the area. Indian artifacts also exist in a number of caves in the Upper Cumberland, ranging from pictographs to petroglyphs. Though the use of some objects remains unknown, Native Americans in the region exhibited significant skill and ingenuity in creating art objects for ceremonial and personal use. Anglo settlers moved into the Upper Cumberland just before 1800. Generally, high culture does not accompany the first settlers in a region , and fine art showed little presence in the Upper Cumberland until a more urban climate developed. Handcrafted objects, however, were a necessary part of everyday life. Settlers used chairs and tables daily. Tools, baskets, pottery, musical instruments, and quilts—also constructed at home—were in constant use. Many craftsmen, such as potters J. A. Roberts and Jefferson Spears, sought to put their own Made on the Mountain 247 identifiable mark on a product, distinguishing it from the work of others . Solomon Allred of Overton County made wooden bowls and plates on a treadle lathe from felled trees on his property around 1830.1 Production of several crafts divided along gender lines whereas others, such as chair making, often involved both sexes—men made the frames while women caned or wove the seats. Some individuals eventually specialized in a specific craft, producing surplus products that others purchased from them. These specialists became professional craftsmen who taught others—usually family members—their skills. As the necessity for those skills diminished with the availability of massproduced items, schools such as Berea in Kentucky organized to keep those dying crafts alive. Nostalgia and recognition of the inherent aesthetic beauty of those objects elevated crafts to the level of art in the twentieth century. Weaving, one of the oldest crafts considered “woman’s work,” was absolutely necessary on the frontier. People raised goats or sheep and planted small stands of flax because cotton grew poorly in the thin soil of the Upper Cumberland. Most farmsteads contained a flax wheel, which women and their daughters used to spin a combination of linen and wool commonly referred to as linsey-woolsey. Clever women improvised buttons from goose quills, wood, and other found objects. Women fashioned basic clothing from what the farm provided, weaving and dying their own cloth. The main dyes used were walnuts, maple bark, madder, copperas, and stone dye.2 The necessity of storage vessels of varying types played a significant role in the production of one of the most enduring crafts of the Upper Cumberland. Although earthenware was produced all over the country, White, DeKalb, and Putnam counties in Tennessee earned a reputation for producing some of the area’s finest crockery.3 The stoneware industry in the Upper Cumberland lasted from roughly 1824 to 1938. Andrew Lafever, the regional patriarch of the craft, brought his skills with him from Wayne County, Kentucky, earning a reputation as an expert potter who created exceptional pieces. Lafever taught the craft to his sons, who passed their knowledge on to other families in the region. As a result, many families earned a reputation for making fine stoneware, including the Dunn, Elmore, Elrod, Hedgcough (who changed their name from Hitchcock), Lacy, Rainey, and Roberts families. In fact, there were so many potteries and people involved in the industry that the southwestern edge of White County was commonly referred to as “Jugtown.”4 J. E. Killebrew quipped about the cottage industry: “So 248 W. CALVIN DICKINSON AND MICHAEL E. BIRDWELL great has been the number of wagons engaged in the ‘crock trade...