The Impact of Arrowcraft on Gatlinburg
When Pi Beta Phi Settlement School teachers Lois Rogers and Harmo Taylor founded Arrowcraft in 1927, they viewed the shop as something of an experiment -- one designed to bring order to the informal, rather chaotic system by which the settlement school staff purchased and marketed handicraft items on behalf of local artisans. At the time, neither of them could have guessed that, by 1935, Arrowcraft would have grown to the point that it was “supporting the largest cottage weaving industry in the United States”; nor could they have imagined that the program’s meteoric rise would occur in the midst of the Great Depression, easily the longest, most severe economic crisis in American (and world) history. They might also have been surprised by the long-term social and economic impact that their “experiment” had on Gatlinburg; for not only did it provide artisans and their families with a profitable alternative to subsistence agriculture, it served to elevate the status of women.
Prior to the advent of the Pi Beta Phi Settlement School and Arrowcraft, the vast majority of Gatlinburg residents relied on subsistence agriculture and home manufacture to meet their nutritional and material needs. That is, families raised, gathered, and made virtually everything that they needed on their farms -- a practice which ensured their survival, but produced little or nothing in the way of marketable surpluses. As a result, Gatlinburg families tended to be “cash poor,” and so were unable to afford labor saving machinery, household appliances, and other “luxury” items available to those in more prosperous regions of the country. Arrowcraft served to break this cycle -- at least to a small extent -- by providing Gatlinburg farm families with a means to earn cash during the normally inactive fall and winter months. Handicraft production did not replace subsistence agriculture as a way of life; and it by no means served to enrich anyone. But participating families were materially better off than they might otherwise have been; and in a region renowned for abject poverty, even the smallest gains were extremely significant.
Arrowcraft profits were particularly important to Gatlinburg families during the difficult years of Great Depression. Pi Beta Phi Alumnae Clubs (the shop’s primary patrons) continued purchasing Arrowcraft items in spite of their own economic hardships, thereby ensuring that Gatlinburg artisans enjoyed access to a steady source of income at a time when many in more traditionally prosperous regions of the country were struggling to make ends meet. On one occasion in the 1930s, a Southern Highland Craft Guild official asked a Pi Beta Phi Settlement School representative how many of those employed by Arrowcraft were receiving, or were expecting to receive, relief checks from the federal government. The unnamed Pi Phi “indignantly declared that none of them were, which brought . . . forceful recognition of the value of Pi Beta Phi work in that area.”
But the benefits of Arrowcraft extended beyond mere economic gain; for the program also served to elevate the status of Gatlinburg women by providing them with heretofore unavailable social and creative outlets. In the days before Arrowcraft, most Gatlinburg women spent their days in the vicinity of their homes, performing a variety of domestic tasks on behalf of their families. Social opportunities were few and far between: a Gatlinburg woman might visit with neighbors once a week at church, or perhaps spend a few hours at her neighbor’s house when the day’s chores were completed; but the bulk of her life was spent in isolation, with her only appreciable social contact coming in the form of husbands, children, and elderly relatives. Opportunities for creative expression were equally scarce. Save for a handful of elderly women whose mothers and grandmothers had taught them how to weave elaborate coverlets, most Gatlinburg women were no more artistically inclined than their contemporaries in other regions of the country. True they were very handy, and often made brooms and other implements for home use. But this was done out of necessity, rather than as a means to fulfill some inner creative urge.