Arrowmont: How a Women's Fraternity Preserved Appalachian Craft
Near Gatlinburg, Tennessee
The Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg grew from an unlikely seed: a service project launched by Pi Beta Phi, a national women's fraternity, in nineteen twelve to mark its approaching fiftieth anniversary. The fraternity established a settlement school in the mountains of Gatlinburg, sending teachers to work with mountain families while documenting and reviving traditional weaving, basketry, and furniture-making. By the late nineteen twenties they had opened the Arrow Craft Shop to market the goods to tourists.
When Pi Beta Phi reorganized its mission in the nineteen sixties, the school transitioned into Arrowmont, an internationally recognized arts and crafts school offering intensive workshops for adult artists. It remains one of the most respected craft education institutions in the country, a legacy of a college fraternity's century-old mountain mission.
