Arrowmont and the Settlement School That Taught a Town

In the middle of downtown Gatlinburg, surrounded by attractions and pancake houses, sits a wooded campus that helped shape the entire region's identity. It began in nineteen twelve, when the Pi Beta Phi women's fraternity chose this tiny, isolated mountain hamlet as the site of its first great service project, a settlement school. A teacher named Mabel Moore had pointed them here as the community most in need.

The grand president made the seventeen mile trek from Sevierville over what she called the worst road in Tennessee to see for herself, and agreed. Classes began in February of nineteen twelve in an abandoned schoolhouse, with just thirteen students at first. For decades the Pi Beta Phi Settlement School provided the only public education around Gatlinburg.

But the women did something else, too. Seeing the skill in the local weaving, basketry, and woodworking, they built a program to revive traditional Appalachian crafts and turn them into income. In nineteen twenty-seven they opened the Arrowcraft Shop to sell that work.

A summer craft workshop followed in nineteen forty-five, and in nineteen sixty-nine the whole enterprise took the name Arrowmont, growing into the nationally respected school of arts and crafts it remains today. The settlement school didn't just teach children their letters. It helped make Gatlinburg a place known for handmade things.