Little Crossings: Amish Roots and an Artisan Village
Near Wisp, Maryland
Long before it was called Grantsville, this crossroads on the old Braddock Road was known as Little Crossings, and it drew Amish and Mennonite families into these mountains through the eighteen hundreds. They came for the isolation and the beauty and the freedom to worship and farm in their own way, and their descendants still work the surrounding hills, where you will pass horse drawn buggies and hand tended fields. That heritage was almost lost to time until a remarkable woman gathered it up.
Alta Schrock was a Mennonite biology professor and, by most accounts, the first American Mennonite woman to earn a doctorate. In nineteen fifty seven she came home to the Alleghenies determined to give the region's craftspeople a place to sell their work and keep their traditions alive. She founded the Penn Alps restaurant inside an old log inn on the National Road, and around it grew the Spruce Forest Artisan Village, a cluster of restored log cabins, some of them very old.
Today artisans still work there in stained glass, bird carving, weaving, and pottery, keeping alive the handmade culture of these mountains.
