Belle Jackson was in Japan. Berea, Ky. has a sister city there and she was onstage during a music festival, when she saw a man standing with his guitar. She reached out, touched it gently, and said, “Martin D28.” He lit up and replied, “D35!” and handed the instrument to her.
“I speak a couple words of Japanese,” says Jackson, “like ‘where’s the bathroom?'” But when she sang “Long Way to Harlan” on a stage across the world, with a view of Mt. Fuji in the distance – “they knew the chorus!”
It’s a long way to Kentucky from there, and even when you’re only driving six hours from Roanoke, Va. it’s a long way, because Berea feels – happily – like another world.
Belle Jackson is the town’s tourism director, and her story is Berea’s story, in a lot of ways. Never mind that she speaks in sound bites any radio producer would love, she means every word of them.
“I am the child raised by the village,” she says. She was born and raised here, granddaughter and great-granddaughter to men who helped build the L&N Train Depot (now the visitor center where her office is housed), daughter and granddaughter to hairdressers. She went to Berea College, and like every other Berea College student – 80 percent are from the Appalachian region, all must show financial need and all must show academic aptitude – she worked in lieu of paying tuition, in the hospital lab.
Up until a few decades ago, the college ran the newspaper, the fire department, the only hotel, the electricity, the water department, the pharmacy. It was the first college in the south to admit women; it was the first college in the south to admit African-Americans –before the Civil War. The college’s crafts program drew artists and students from all over, and they’re still here, though graying, says Jackson.
The town is more independent now, though the college is still the heart of it. Berea is shaded by the college’s history of diversity and liberalism – the likes of Alex Haley, Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama have visited, lived, spoken or served on the college board here. Students at the college can elect to live in the school’s ecovillage, where they live “off the grid,” run a greenhouse and dry their laundry on clotheslines. And, as Jackson eloquently puts it, “combining massage with rotator cuff surgery isn’t seen as weird.”
I’m staying in the Boone Tavern, the hotel that the college has run since the wife of the first president came up with the idea to build it after she found herself entertaining up to 200 guests a summer. It’s a beautiful place, especially in the holidays, when I’m here with my mother along for company. The parlors are lit with Christmas trees and strung lights, and there’s hot apple cider brewing in the lobby. I stay up late, catching up on e mail by wireless in the room and reading in the second-floor sitting room. I catch myself staring long into a mirror, looking backwards down a carpeted hall, waiting for ghosts.
Berea is walkable. The Boone Tavern is at one end of a full block of restaurants, galleries, a coffee shop, the college bookstore. Step across the street and you’re on campus proper, with its old holly trees, or across the street in two other directions and there are more galleries.
Appalachian Fireside Crafts is one of the oldest galleries in the town, member-owned, with a great art deco sign above its door and quilts, pottery, ironwork, jewelry, woodwork, books and toys inside – it was once a bank, and so the vault is now devoted to fabric art and clothing.
Churchill Weavers [NOTE: unfortunately, Churchill Weavers was sold to new owners and subsequently closed since this article was first published], some blocks away from the center of town, has its own unique history. Started in 1922 by David and Eleanor Churchill, missionaries who taught weaving to impoverished women in India, it now ships its throws and garments to stores including Bloomingdale’s. The looms are the original ones that David designed and built, with parts replaced every so often.
Log House Craft Gallery, in a 1917 building, is owned by Berea College, and comprises two floors of work. Wood pieces, ironwork, brooms and woven items made by students is sold here and in the Boone Tavern gift shop; it’s all a continuation of the college’s major role in revitalizing regional handcraft in the 19th and 20th centuries (heavily influencing such endeavors as the creation of the Southern Highland Craft Guild).
Nearly everywhere you walk, you’ll find woodworkers, weavers, potters and others, in galleries and studios in town. And each gallery is different – I didn’t find myself walking into gallery after gallery and seeing the same pieces, the same artists. They also reflect a polarity evident throughout town and campus: a strong, devoted traditional arts community, and a strong, devoted contemporary arts community.
The Kentucky Artisans Center is the newest center of creativity in Berea – built of limestone, designed by by Kentucky architects, it opened three years ago just off Interstate 75. The ceiling is southern pine, the roof slate and copper, the floor clay tile. It’s filled with art, books, music recordings and craft, all by Kentucky or Kentucky-connected artisans, many of whom demonstrate here on Fridays and Saturdays. Even though it’s primarily a retail space, it operates a bit like a museum too, with rotating exhibits put together by Gwen Hefner, who serves as public relations director, curator and programming director –and a potter in her hard-to-find spare time, so she knows the other side of the art business too.
“We have had many artists,” says Hefner, “that have written us and said that without us they would not have been able to make it.” In a way, the center continues what the college started – the idea that yes, an artist – or a town – can live by art.
