Our Mission
The Cumberland Folk School is a place to preserve, teach, celebrate and commune around traditional crafts and skills. Our classes are built upon the inherent connection between traditional skills, sustainable land management, and farming to teach self-reliance skills and the use of natural materials to create beautiful utilitarian objects.
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Carroll manages most of the behind the scenes tasks for the folk school. She manages the website, email, and arranges and schedules classes. She is also a professional gardener and former cut-flower farmer. She dabbles in many crafts, but her favorite medium is knitting.
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Ashley manages the classes day of and most of the onsite work and facilities for the folk school. She is a member of the Sequatchie Cove Farm family and manages communication between the school and farm. She does the cooking and meal planning for classes and social media. She is a farmer, home schools her three children, and continues to enjoy learning new crafts.
Our Story
The folk school grew out of our friendship and mutual passion for traditional skills. We had connected over crafts as friends and had individually entertained the idea of offering craft workshops on our separate farms over the years. When Carroll relocated and moved closer we decided to have a go at it together, and what better place than Ashley’s family farm, Sequatchie Cove Farm. We are lucky to be part of a strong community of artists, farmers, thinkers, and progressive makers and doers. We are expanding on this, creating a more formal place to connect over and teach what we love and believe integral to a full life. The ability to create things with our our hands is essential to our being and we wanted to do and share more of this.
In her early 20’s Ashley went to work at the Sequatchie Valley Institute, where she was introduced to the folk school style of learning, and learned about natural building, gardening, permaculture design, wild foraging, and so much more. A year later she participated in a work study program at the John C. Campbell Folk School for 3 months. It was there she learned to weave baskets, knit, dye with natural materials, play the banjo, felt, and contra dance. These experiences initiated her drive to continue this form of preservation and skill sharing, and she brings these experiences of learning directly from craftspeople in a school setting to our school.
Carroll grew up in a family of craftspeople active in the preservation of traditional crafts. Her mother is a potter, painter, seamstress, and art teacher. Her father is a woodworker and antique furniture conservator for a museum devoted to the preservation and collection of 17th and 18th century decorative arts. Her family’s passion for making, preserving, and surrounding themselves with traditional handmade items strongly influenced her own interest in learning traditional crafts— and developed her interest in continuing the work of teaching and preserving folk skills.
Our hope is to bring these experiences and love of traditional crafts and skills to others and to provide a place for people to come develop their own story of how folk traditions became a part of their personal story.
