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Aunt Arie
That year, the kids met the woman who, in the minds of many, came to embody the whole Foxfire project. Arie Carpenter, better known as “Aunt Arie” to the students, was born in 1885 and lived alone in a mountain cabin after her husband passed away. She grew her own food, drew water from a hand-dug well, and in the words of one student, was “the wisest, kindest, most giving human being I had ever met.” Wigginton recorded, “Ask any of those students who met her – even if only once – about Aunt Arie, and chances are each will look down at the ground, pause a moment, and say something like, ‘I loved her.’” Aunt Arie would become a...
A Northern Landscape
Tankard in Norsk Folkemuseum Collection Editor’s note: Master cooper, Marshall Scheetz sent this brief reflection from his research trip to Norway. During my two-week research trip to Norway, I got to visit deep fjords, mountains ground flat by glaciers, medieval stave churches, and vast museum collections of aging dairy buckets and beer tankards. Just because I have seen these things doesn’t necessarily mean they can be easily explained. I’m still processing this northern landscape and the objects I encountered. To be honest, it was culturally and historically overwhelming – each evening I had to walk the neighborhoods in order to sort my thoughts. Tankards and Cans at De Heibergske Samlinger collection, Sogn Folkemuseum Working with museum staff curators, restoration conservators,...
Harmony and Calm Confidence
After we rived enough parts for two chairs, Kenneth opened a tool chest full of drawknives and I used a half-dozen different styles to begin refining the riven parts. Kenneth had spent many hours with these tools. He had no trouble using any of them, but knew the ones that fit his body best. I had the freedom to switch back and forth between drawknives, finding those that felt most natural to my hand and comparing them to the only drawknife I had used, an antique from my grandfather’s farm. Kenneth noticed that the handles of my grandfather’s knife had been bent out of parallel, so we spent the last part of the afternoon removing the wooden handles, heating up...
