Mary Cornwell of Wayneville, retired Extension home
economics agent, creator of North Carolina State Fair’s Village of Yesteryear,
and founder of the Museum of North Carolina Handicrafts, received the Western
Carolina University’s Mountain Heritage Award in 1989. Her work as an agent
with the North Carolina Extension Service in Cherokee and Haywood counties from
1942 to 1976 introduced her to mountain crafts.
“During the ‘40s she helped
relocate families displaced by the Tennessee Valley dam projects Fontana and
Appalachia.
And it was in Cherokee County
that she met homemaker and crafts-woman Laura Warner, sister of Penland School
of Crafts founder Lucy Morgon, and learned about crafts through her and the
John C. Campbell Folk School at Brasstown.
“Mrs. Warner called me the first
day I was there,” Miss Cornwell said. “And she said, ‘What do you about
crafts?’ I said ‘I don’t know a thing, but I want to learn.’ She said, ‘God
bless you, I’m on my way to see you.’
“And here she came driving a T-Model
Ford. She walked in the office and gave me a bunch of necklaces with pewter
crosses. And it created my interest.”
In 1949 she moved to Waynesville
as Haywood County Home Demonstration agent, and two years later was asked by
State Fair Director J.S. Dorton to create the Village of Yesteryear, which
would be devoted to mountain handicrafts and craftspeople demonstrating the old
crafts.
The Village of Yesteryear, Mary
Cornwell recalled, began with 14 craftspeople from Cherokee, Haywood, Yancey,
and Watauga counties in a small slab building 14 feet by 20 feet with two
tables. Today more than 100 craftspeople demonstrate and explain their work in
a permanent spacious brick structure.”
For the rest of this article on Mary Cornwell, go to http://digitalheritage.org/2012/12/mary-cornwell-1989/
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