Backcountry Makers is a sequel to Betsy K. White’s Great Road Style: The Decorative Arts Legacy of Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee (University of Virginia Press, 2006). Both books present findings from field and archival research conducted by the Cultural Heritage Project at the William King Regional Arts Center (now William King Museum) in Abingdon, Virginia, of which the author was director until retiring in 2008. The approach taken is that of historically oriented decorative arts rather than folkloristics, with the bulk of the artifacts discussed and illustrated dating to the nineteenth century. However, many of the objects were traditionally handcrafted and are thus of interest to students of material folk culture, and the sequel’s third chapter does address the twentieth century, with two of the artists still alive when the book was written.
The geographic locus of both publications is a section of the Valley of Virginia known as the Great Road that began to attract settlers in the late-eighteenth century via the Philadelphia Wagon Road. A goodly portion of the Appalachian artisans represented in both books had roots in Pennsylvania, and before that, Germany, thus testifying to the contributions of Pennsylvania Germans to southern folk culture. The key difference between the two volumes is that Great Road Style is object-oriented and organized by media, while Backcountry Makers, as the title indicates, features artisans for whom signed or attributed examples of their work could be found (with the exception of “The Unknown Potter,” whose distinctive earthenware may have been made by more than one individual) and for whom biographies could be constructed from written records and oral histories. The sequel is organized by three time periods—“Early Days,” “The Middle Years,” and “Into the Twentieth Century”—and then, within each period, somewhat loosely by media. This scheme has the advantage of relating the local arts to larger historical movements such as the handcraft revival of the early twentieth century. It also, however, is somewhat arbitrary, since some artisans do not fit neatly into just one of the three periods. The genealogically heavy biographical sketches make for dense reading, but serve to establish the “handing on” of family tradition from one generation to the next, and should be of interest to readers from the region with kinship ties to the artisans.
Most expected crafts are represented in Backcountry Makers, with especially strong treatments of furniture, textiles, and pottery. Many of the artisans lived in the vicinity of Abingdon (Washington County), the operations base for the research project, undoubtedly making information about them more logistically accessible. Three gunsmiths are included, their hunting weapons of a style that relates them to Pennsylvania-Kentucky rifles. But the products of blacksmiths per se (hand-forged iron) and leather craftsmen (cobblers, saddlers, and harness makers) are missing, perhaps because such work was rarely signed and thus not easily attributable. Despite the region’s rich basketry tradition, only three makers appear, and just in the twentieth-century section. Self-taught or academically influenced painters are better represented, although their creations, in my opinion, pale in comparison to those of the skilled traditional craftspeople.
Without intending to, the book raises questions for folklorists that test the sometimes fuzzy boundaries of our discipline. Some of the furniture was handcrafted by makers who learned their skills in a family or apprenticeship setting, but with designs in keeping with fashionable Victorian taste. Would we still call these folk artifacts? Similarly, the represented wood carvers chose idiosyncratic subjects for their work, albeit reflecting their rural environment (e.g., farm animals). One carver, Rufus Ball of Buchanan County, Virginia (alive as of the book’s writing, and whose wonderful carving of a foot-tapping mandolin player I happen to own), loves mountain music, and so includes musical instruments and miniature musicians in his repertoire, but there is no indication in his biography that he learned his designs in a traditional way. Does the fact that he depicts local folklife in his work qualify him as a traditional artist? (Would we call Mark Twain a “folk writer” for that reason?) The chances are, however, that like many rural and small-town whittlers he was given a pocketknife as a boy by an adult relative along with basic instruction on its use, making his carving skills at least partly folk (not unlike those quilters who draw their designs largely from printed sources but who apply needle skills learned in youth from an adult).
My main quibble with Backcountry Makers is not with the author but with the publisher; many of the color photographs are reproduced too small to show much detail, most likely an economic more than a design decision. However, the book succeeds admirably in documenting a group of artisans from a small, previously under-explored, and some would argue, distinctive area of the South spanning a century and a half of creative activity.
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[Review length: 801 words • Review posted on February 19, 2014]