Made In The Smokies

Whether toiling in tucked-away mountain workshops or bustling tourist studios, the region’s best artisans carry on traditions that have been passed down through the generations—oftentimes in their own families. The makers featured here put their hearts and hands into each of their one-of-a-kind works.

A Fisher of Men: Bill Oyster

If fly-fishing is an art, fly rods are the paintbrush. But for the true disciple, fly-fishing is a religion—and the split-bamboo fly rod is their altar.

“For the American fly fisher, this is our samurai sword,” says Bill Oyster, a master craftsman who’s perfected the intricate and elusive skill of making split bamboo fly rods.

At his studio in Blue Ridge, Georgia, fly-fishermen enamored by the mystical bamboo rod will camp out for hours at the viewing window overlooking Oyster’s workshop.

“That’s the question—what is it about the lure of the bamboo rod?” Oyster poses. “As a fly-fisherman you always notice them. Any time someone pulls out a bamboo rod there is always some reverence that goes on.”

Making a bamboo fly rod is a meticulous craft. There’s far more involved than peeling off a strip of bamboo cane and whittling it down to form. Each rod is the fusion of long thin bamboo slivers, derived by splitting the stalk and hand-planing strips into slender triangles, each one tapered to an infinitesimal point and then seamed into a hexagon bundle.

For Oyster, every rod is a labor of love, a fitting homage to the intricate pursuit of fly-fishing. “Fly-fishing is so involved and so beautiful and so artistic. I call it fishing for grown-ups. It is not just about catching the fish,” Oyster says.

When Oyster isn’t building rods, he’s leading workshops to carry on the traditional art form. The split-bamboo fly rod is a uniquely American invention, dating to the mid-1800s. It’s more whippy and nimble, an adaptation coined for the narrow trout streams of Southern Appalachia where flies must be landed among the hazards of laurel thickets and low-hanging hemlocks.

“There wasn’t room for the big wooden rods like the English used. Here, we needed something shorter and more flexible,” Oyster says. 

Oyster’s own foray into bamboo rod-building was a hard-fought journey, however. 

“The only guys who knew were other professional rod makers, but they wouldn’t tell you anything. It was a very closely guarded secret,” Oyster says.

There was no Google back then, no YouTube instructional videos, no online forums. Oyster tried combing the reference section of libraries for historical fly-fishing literature, but in the end, it came down to old-fashioned reconnaissance. Oyster sniffed around fly shops, asking anyone he came across if they knew the craft.

“They’d say ‘Go see old Jerry, he’s a master craftsman and he’s made them,’” Oyster recalls.

But when he got to Jerry’s, he came up empty. It turned out old Jerry made a noble stab at bamboo rod, but got stumped and gave up. Oyster rooted out many men who’d tried, but none who’d pulled it off.

Once, Oyster thought he’d finally hit the jackpot. His slippery but fearless quest led him to New England, home to a known network of old bamboo rod builders. He tracked them down during a fly-fishing rendezvous and sauntered up to their circle, but was met with silent disdain in return. 

“That knowledge was their career and they were protecting their livelihood,” Oyster says. “I knew that was not good for the craft. The average age of a bamboo rod maker was like 150. That means it was dying out.”

Oyster came away more determined than ever, but realized he was on his own to reinvent the time-honored craft of split bamboo-rod building.

“I worked until I needed the next tool and said OK, now I can safely buy this tool because I made it this far,” Oyster says.

After Oyster mastered the process, he soon found the wader was on the other foot, with curious anglers now probing him for the secret. Initially, he followed the same creed of secrecy that had dogged his own pursuit.

“Because that’s the only the only thing I knew. I thought you weren’t supposed to tell,” Oyster says. “But I didn’t enjoy telling people, ‘Go away I don’t want to talk to you.’ I felt like I had been in an argument.”

Oyster’s next move was a game changer, one that quite likely saved the craft of bamboo fly rod building. He not only shared the process readily, he launched workshops to teach others the art.

“People said, ‘Oh you are just going to train your competition. You are going to put yourself out of business in a few years,’” Oyster says.

But the vast majority who came to him were hobbyists, just interested in building a rod of their own to cherish, and to deepen their personal connection with the art of fly-fishing.

“I discovered there was a whole market of people who thought it would be cool to make their own bamboo fly rod,” Oyster says.

There’s another reason he wasn’t too worried.

“It is a very acute peak of the mountain, and if you aren’t at the top, you aren’t making a living,” Oyster says.

Oyster, 45, is indeed at the top, one of the most revered rod builders in the world. Oyster’s finely crafted rods are highly-sought—his most notable customer is probably former President Jimmy Carter, adorned with an engraving of the presidential seal.

Every Oyster rod includes a custom engraving job on the handle—he can replicate any image a customer dreams up—a signature element that sets his rods apart. 

A hand-crafted bamboo fly rod is a hefty investment, at least compared to their mass-produced graphite counterparts. But they aren’t just for the elite. A brick layer made $200 monthly payments for three years to get one.

Oyster’s wife, Shannen, is his right hand and biggest champion. She schedules his workshops, manages orders, runs their retail store front, and regales the procession of spectators who come by to see the bamboo fly rod master at his craft. 

Their two young children are part of the shop’s daily rhythm as well. This summer, his 11-year-old son likely became the youngest fly fisher in history to build a bamboo rod, taking a seat behind the workbench as a student in one of Oyster’s rod-building workshops.

Hundreds of fly-fishermen have cycled through Oyster’s rod workshops over the past 15 years. In high demand, his workshops are booked solid a year in advance. Red pinheads cover a map tacked to a wall of the studio, a testament to the many anglers who’ve made the pilgrimage to northern Georgia to study under Oyster’s hand. 

The real journey for the novice rod builder, however, is a spiritual one, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity where fly-fishermen forge a profound bond through the craft.

“It is extremely rare to have a class where a grown man doesn’t cry the night of the last dinner,” Oyster says.

More Gear Makers

• Be prepared for drenching downpours, sweltering sun, or anything Mother Nature throws your way during a day of outdoor adventuring with Weathermax Canopies produced by Tsuga. Light-weight enough for a daypack, their flexible configuration can be attached to a tailgate, boat, or just about anything. All its products are cut, print, sewn, and packaged in Boone, North Carolina. Tsuga also offers a tough, rugged product line for outdoor laborers, such as utility buckets for line electricians. The design and production team specializes in custom orders as well: The North Carolina Forest Service has commissioned Tsuga to make custom covers, including covers for truck wench attachments and backpack blowers. tsuga.us.
• Capricorn Bicycles fabricates custom bicycle frames by hand, producing high-quality, personally engineered bikes, from street cruising to long-distance road riding to mountain biking. Bradley Wilson runs the one-man operation in Marshall, North Carolina. Wilson can design and make any bike part and accessory you can dream up, from porter-style racks for around town or camping gear for multi-day rides. capricornworkshop.com.
• Based in Brevard, North Carolina, Sylvan Sport makes outdoor adventure in the Smokies easier with an innovative line of camper and gear trailers that hits all the right notes of comfort, space, and aesthetics—without the bulk or footprint of an RV. Functioning as a lightweight yet rugged utility trailer, equipped with flexible rack space, whether camping or day-tripping, they make transporting your gear to the trail head or water’s edge a breeze. The versatile design has garnered the Sylvan Sport GO models international acclaim and accolades. sylvansport.com.

Master of Clay: Tommy Bullen

Tommy Bullen never takes no for an answer, especially from a lump of clay.

A traditional craft born of necessity, pottery is a boundless art form in Bullen’s no-holds-barred world of innovation. The head potter and lead design for the Old Mill Pigeon River Pottery in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, Bullen is a fiddler, a tinker, an inventor, a designer. Through it all, he constantly pushes the clay envelope to expand their massive and unique inventory.

His team includes 10 crafters—five makers who mold and throw the clay and five finishers who complete the pieces with glazing and firing. Together, they churn out 80,000 pieces a year, making it one of the most successful handmade pottery operations in the country.

Despite their large-scale production, tradition dies hard at Pigeon River Pottery. Today’s potters still fire their pieces in the same kiln and mix their clay by the same recipe as their predecessors did 70 years ago.

The potters studio is housed on the grounds of the Old Mill, an historical darling among Pigeon Forge destinations. The Old Mill dates to the 1800s, and its water wheel still churns out batches of stone-ground grain daily. Pottery is just one of the many handmade crafts for sale in the shops of the Old Mill Square. 

An example of the potters’ vast repertoire, Bullen’s kitchen crockery line leaves no stone unturned: from the requisite pie plates, casserole pans, bread bakers, soup bowls, and jam jars to the more obscure wine toppers and bacon cookers.

But Bullen always has new ideas in the pipeline. He’s currently experimenting with corn on the cob dishes and a juicer. Sometimes, he even culls ideas from the shop’s guest book.

“There’s one visitor who keeps writing, ‘Why don’t you have a butter dish?’ Three months later she’s back again, writing in the guest book, ‘You still don’t have a butter dish,’” Bullen says.

Shelf space is Bullen’s biggest enemy these days. Do you suspend the line of bear spoon rests and bear business card holders to make room for the newfangled sponge holder shaped like a pig? (Incidentally, the exaggerated snout sticks over the edge of the sink for the drips to drain out.)

One of Bullen’s more unique inventions of late: a pottery amplifier for your cell phone speaker, much like the horn on old phonograph players.

“We used to take our phones and set them in bowls and broken pots while we were working so we could hear them a little better, and we worked on making it a sellable product,” Bullen says.

While Bullen’s inspiration is distinctly 21st century, his craft roots run deep as a third-generation Smokies artist. His mother dabbled in many mediums, a metal sculptor by trade specializing in ornamental branches art. As a child, Bullen would be pressed into service at the living room coffee table, using a ball ping hammer to add texture and veins to hundreds of tiny copper leaves, and as he got older, using snips to cut them out.

Bullen’s grandfather was the craft patriarch of the family. A metal worker in Gatlinburg, Bullen’s grandfather forged benches, railings, sign posts, and trashcans for the downtown district. Between commissioned jobs, he fed his artistic passion making fireplace sets and hooks to sell in his downtown shop Maple’s Forge.

So it was natural for his mother to become a metal worker. “The forge was there, the tools were there, the knowledge was there, so it was passed down,” Bullen says.

His grandfather’s forge was his playground as a child. “I would round up a bunch of scrap pieces and pile them together and play with them,” recalls Bullen, now 37.

In hindsight, Bullen’s destiny to become an artist was cast at birth.

“If I did really well in baseball I didn’t really hear anything about it. But if I did a drawing it went on the fridge,” he says.

As he got older, his mother sent him to sundry handicraft workshops at the nearby Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, a century-old institution borne of the  Southern Appalachian craft revival movement of the 1920s.

“Most kids were going to Camp Smoky or playing outside in the summer,” Bullen says. But Bullen was learning the craft of basket weaving, metal working, stained glass, painting—and of course pottery. Even now, at the top of his game, Bullen still takes time to sneak in an Arrowmont pottery workshop to continually hone his craft.

Bullen’s never far from his inspiration. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park wraps around the 20-acre family tract where his home studio sits. A sense of place is evident in many of his pieces, from the tree silhouettes in his candle luminaries to the dogwood flowers on his mugs. 

“You just kind of absorb it being around it, and it translates into your work,” Bullen says.

Bullen doesn’t always have time for inspiration though. Some days, Bullen is a clay machine—pinching and pressing, rolling and molding, cutting and carving, whipping out hundreds of tiny clay animals from dawn to dusk.

He averages a staggering 10,000 pottery animals a year: bears, raccoons, foxes, pigs, cats, turtles, frogs, ducks, sheep, and the list goes on.

Each item is handmade yet mass produced, the secret lying in Bullen’s patterns. Each piece is a balance of form and function, weighing the artistic merits of design against the ease of large-scale hand reproduction.

If a vase handle is too intricate, it will take the potters too much time to make, driving up the price of the piece.

Bullen loves the challenge of designing a new piece that can be built and glazed quickly to keep the pottery affordable. 

“You have to get price right so everybody wins. I think that is my favorite part of all of this—coming up with a design that balances the art with the process so people can still afford it,” Bullen says.

Bullen shatters the stereotype of handcrafted art being something for the rich. Anyone with a few bucks can take home their own piece of Pigeon River Pottery—even if it’s just a magnetic finger vase for the fridge, the perfect holder for that button violet plucked on the way to the mailbox.

Bullen spots his work everywhere he goes, from a teapot on the counter of a friend’s lake house to toothpick holders at local diners.

One of Pigeon River Pottery’s top sellers is its signature line of bear figurines. There are nearly 30 poses in all—bears walking, bears sitting, bears rolling, bears sniffing, bears lapping honey—and some buyers collect them all.

“They get mad if I don’t release one every year,” Bullen says. His latest, and possibly his favorite, is Banjo Bear, its small arms spread open as if cradling a banjo.

Bullen introduced a line of face jugs to Pigeon River Pottery about 10 years ago, rekindling the traditional Southern Appalachian folk art dating back to the 1800s. Face jugs were traditionally used for storing spirits, adorned with ugly faces to scare children away from the liquor stash.

Unlike the mass-produced pieces, each face jug is an original. “The crazier the look, the uglier the jug, the better. If I have an eye falling out or a tooth missing, those will move the fastest,” Bullen says.

As for the butter dish? One day, Bullen says, one day.

More Home Artisans

• As an artist, Melissa Weiss draws her inspiration from the earth, quite literally. A potter in Asheville, North Carolina, Weiss digs her own clay mud, screening and mixing the organic compound by hand. The raw process behind wild-harvested clay gives her pottery a distinctive iron-specked look, complemented by her signature white, black, and gray tones produced by an ash glaze. Her unique designs and muted glaze styles are a blend of industrial, Appalachian, indigenous, and modern geometric elements. melissaweisspottery.com.
• Kudzu Factory in Mountain City, Georgia, is on a mission to develop creative, innovative, and functional products made of kudzu, including arbors, chairs, vine baskets of every size and shape, hoops, craft forms, and larger-than-life woven sculptures, as well as candles from the leaves. 3001 Highway 441.
• Bringing a new concept to market can be an insurmountable hurdle for designers. Zac Lopez-Ibanez is trying to break down that barrier. Based in Asheville, North Carolina, his firm Fehlo connects the home décor designs of contemporary craftspeople to customers looking for eclectic, handcrafted wares to furnish their homes. The lighting, furniture, and accessories he selects for small-run production are sleek and organic, with an emphasis on elegant yet understated lines. fehlo.com. 

Pioneers of Cherokee Design: Pete & Christy Long

Cradling a block of freshly hewn white oak between his knees, Pete Long slides his curved knife across the rough slab, peeling back the layers of wood as easily as dipping ice cream. With each stroke, the pile of curly shavings at his feet grows, and a smooth oblong dough bowl slowly comes into being.

His daughter, Christy Long, perched on the edge of her father’s band-saw, watches him work as the sun breaks over the ridge and glints through the cracks of his log-cabin workshop.

“His coffee is as stout as wood carvings,” Christy says, raising a pottery mug with the profile of a Cherokee warrior to her lips.

Deep in the Smoky Mountains of Cherokee, N.C., this father-daughter duo is quietly carrying on a long legacy of traditional Cherokee craft. Christy credits her father with passing on more than just a trade. From him, she’s learned the art of resiliency, the art of resourcefulness, and the art of resolve. 

“To me, it is the wellspring that came down from traditional thought,” Christy says.

Handmade in the truest sense, Pete’s woodcarvings unite his ancestral landscape and native ingenuity. He cuts his own wood from the forest, slabs it on a band-saw he built from scrap parts, and sculpts it with tools he made—whether it’s a chisel forged from the push-rod of an old motor or an anvil fashioned from a piece of a junked backhoe.

“You use what you can get your hands on to get by,” Pete says. “I can’t run to the hardware store every time I turn around.”

For Pete, woodcarving is just another way of deriving a living from the land—not much different than the life of his grandfather who was a woodcarver, a farmer, and a logger.

Carving a hummingbird to peddle at tourist craft shops wasn’t much different to his grandfather than growing a crop of corn to eat or cutting a load of firewood to sell. The same was true for Pete while raising a family of five on the economically depraved Cherokee reservation in the 1980s. He would often stay up all hours for days at a stretch to finish a carving to take to town and sell.

“We had bills to pay and groceries to buy,” Pete recalls.

While his art was born of necessity, Long is revered as one of the more accomplished carvers in Cherokee, with several of his statues and sculptures on permanent display in the promenades of the Cherokee Casino and Resort. While woodcarving is a family legacy, the transmission of knowledge in Cherokee culture is absorbed rather than taught or tutored.

“It has to come from inside the person who’s doing it,” Pete says. “It’s not something somebody can instill in someone else.”

Christy no doubt inherited the trait of adaptation from her father, but has put her own artistic mark on Cherokee craft by infusing contemporary objects with ancient designs. To Christy, Cherokee art isn’t static, nor should it be confined to stand-alone collector’s items or fine art. Instead, Long adorns every day objects with the elegant symmetry of native motifs—a light switch plate, a rolling pin, a cutting board, a wallet, a day journal.

“I try to create functional items made by Cherokees in the 21st century that people can use in their homes,” she says. “I am constantly trying new ideas and pushing boundaries.”

While Christy defies the traditional Cherokee mediums of pottery, basketry, and beadwork, she clings to the traditional elements of Cherokee design. Cherokee symbols resonate in her work, subtle yet omnipresent, subconscious yet conveyed.

Some are simple: a pair of wooden earrings shaped like a breast cancer awareness ribbon, but as a feather instead of a ribbon. Others are highly intricate, like her dough bowl design called “Ebb ‘n flow,” which illustrates the sacred view of water and interconnectedness of life.

Cherokee stories are the nucleus of her designs, which depict native belief systems. 

“Our designs are rooted in ancient stories,” Christy says.

In the spirit of her father’s ingenuity, she loves inventing items with multiple uses, like a pair of earrings engraved with a basket-weave design that can be used as a pottery stamp.

“How cool is it for a potter to have this pair of earrings they can wear, but take off and use as a tool to stamp their own work?” Christy says.

Versatility is inherent in Long’s creations—such as her circular cork boards with geometric Cherokee patterns that can double as bulletin boards or a mouse pad.

Christy is often commissioned as an artist to design and produce custom work, from engraving the side-arms carried by the Cherokee police force to the winner’s medallions awarded in the tribe’s annual half-marathon.

But sometimes Long creates art for art’s sake. One morning, her children woke up to a plate of eggs and toast engraved with “good morning” in Cherokee syllabary.

Each product begins with a design development phase, followed by a handmade prototype. Some pieces are sold in the Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual in downtown Cherokee, N.C., but her portfolio is so vast most of her prototypes exist only in her catalog, waiting for a buyer to commission its reproduction.

Christy is regarded as a pioneer of Cherokee design, with some of her work featured in the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian—such as her Seven Clans executive pen set, an example of native elements in modern applications.

“It makes me happy when I know I have created something beautiful and meaningful that challenges stereotypes, confronts cultural appropriation, and shares our story with the world,” Christy says.

A contemporary take on Cherokee syllabary is a theme in Christy’s work, whether it’s applying graffiti-style Cherokee lettering to skateboards or wooden preschool blocks engraved with the characters of the Cherokee alphabet.

“I hope to lift the veil of cultural amnesia that has resulted from centuries of suppression and forced assimilation,” Long says.

Christy is an expert at bridging worlds, not only in her art but her life. She was raised in the white world by her non-Cherokee mother in Sylva, North Carolina, and knew little about her Cherokee heritage in her childhood. When her mom died at the age of 16, she was both physically and spiritually lost. Her DNA was Cherokee, yet she was an outsider when she came home to the reservation, known as the Qualla Boundary.

She was eventually taken in by her extended Cherokee family, but finding acceptance wasn’t always easy.

“I was caught in the middle of two worlds. It took a long time to blend them,” she says.

Christy’s journey to rediscover her Cherokee heritage—the philosophy of what it means to be Cherokee—has been intentional, from learning how to bear hunt to participating in spiritual stomp dance gatherings. 

“I love my culture and I want to share its infinite beauty with others,” she says.

Christy has recently been producing a line of ornate dough bowls, crafted from wood harvested and cut with her father’s help. The dough bowl is a symbol in its own right of the Appalachian families who inhabited the mountains since time immemorial, Christy says, but her version brings Cherokee legends to life with the artist.

Christy’s path as an artist is hard to define. She calls herself a designer, a creator, and a maker. But an artist?

“Art is a hard concept to discuss. What is art? What is Cherokee art? What is contemporary Cherokee art?” Christy says. 

As she sees it, Cherokee art is rooted in functionality. But ultimately her art is a tangible outlet for expressing Cherokee identity in contemporary objects. “Not only are you expressing the pride in your culture, but it is a topic of conversation about who we were, who we are, who we want to be,” Christy says. “The need is to tell our stories in every way we can. Our culture is the future of our community.”

More Cherokee Craftspeople

A renowned Cherokee basket weaver, Mary Thompson carries on the skilled craft of turning river cane into water-tight vessels adorned with intricate geometric patterns using double-weave technology. She learned the art from her mother and has now passed it on to her daughter—linking three generations of basket makers. Thompson’s work is highly collected and is featured in many notable collections of Cherokee art. authenticallycherokee.com/artists/mary-thompson.  

• A once almost-lost art, Cherokee finger weaving is only practiced by a few native crafters today, including Cherokee artist Karen George. Rather than using a loom, finger weavers tie a fistful of long yarns to a pole frame and weave the thread together from the top down. George creates tight, colorful fabric sashes, often incorporating seed beads into her weaving. George demonstrates finger-weaving at the living-history Oconaluftee Indian Village and markets her work through the Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual. blueridgeheritage.com/traditional-artist-directory/karen-george. 
• The flute is one of the earliest musical instruments made by the ancestors of modern man, dating back tens of thousands of years. Today, Cherokee crafter Ernie Lossiah carries on the tradition of handmade cedar flutes. An artist of many mediums, Lossiah is also a wood and stone carver, with one of his carvings residing at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. lossiaharts.wix.com/lossiaharts

The Man Behind the Strings: Tim Gardner

There’s two sides to every coin, three to a triangle, but a hundred or more to a Cedar Mountain Banjo. 

Luckily, Tim Gardner knows all of them.

Sliding back from his workbench, Gardner loops his woodworker’s apron over a nail and pulls one of his latest creations to his knee. Bright, buoyant notes leap into the air, as if the banjo was somehow alive in his hands.

“The banjo is more than the sum of its parts. There’s a sound envelope that resonates out from the entire instrument,” Gardner says. “All the parts have to work together in harmony.”

Based near Brevard, North Carolina, Gardner’s handcrafted Cedar Mountain Banjos feature an aesthetic grace and warm luster that quickly charms anyone who lays eyes on them. 

Behind every banjo, there are dozens of hidden steps, each one inching the raw wood—woods with stellar tonality like curly maple, rosewood, cherry, and locust—closer to its perfect form. Gardner’s a luthier, an artist, a craftsman, and, some days, just a cog in his own assembly wheel.

“You wear a lot of hats being a builder. If you want to actually be profitable at it, you are mixing art with manufacturing,” says Gardner, 36. “You are also a process engineer at the same time.”

The rim of the Cedar Mountain Banjo pots are made from dozens of small blocks joined like a giant hoop-shaped jigsaw puzzle, a construction technique handed down from Gardner’s father.

Mountain music imbibed Gardner’s upbringing. His parents, Lo and Mary Gordon, were anchors in the old-time music community, with their music store in downtown Brevard doubling as a regional musicians’ hub.

As a kid, Gardner trailed along to bluegrass and old-time music festivals with his dad, who would casually mosey up to a pickin’ circle with a Cedar Mountain Banjo in his hands and join in. 

Lo started Cedar Mountain Banjos in the mid-1990s, the name borrowed from the small community where they lived outside Brevard. Lo stumbled into banjo building thanks to his maker’s streak. After fashioning one from a kit as a hobby project, he began wondering if he could build one from scratch, and the tinkering began. 

“There were very few custom banjo makers then,” Gardner says. 

Twenty years later, Cedar Mountain has more than 600 banjos under its belt. 

Gardner’s been lucky to follow in his father’s footsteps,  not only inheriting the know-how but the legacy of craftsmanship that Cedar Mountain Banjos has carved out.

Cedar Mountain Banjos have made their way into the instrument arsenals of several bluegrass stars, including the famous Asheville-based mountain musician David Holt and Grammy-winner Al Petteway.

Despite his early immersion in the mountain music scene—he took up the fiddle after his mom at the age of 7—his foray into the family banjo business was a gradual evolution.

A forestry major in college, Gardner landed back home in Brevard between firefighting gigs out West. He was scraping together a living playing the fiddle and working odd jobs when the stars aligned.

“I was working construction one February—and it was really cold,” Gardner says, who was 25 at the time. “I needed a job, and Dad needed a helper.”

Lo had two builders working for him already, but was so consumed by the business side of the operation—managing orders, finding suppliers, juggling the books, courting customers—that he rarely spent time in the workshop himself anymore.

He took his son under his wing, and Gardner soon became the classic tale of an apprentice who surpasses his master. But it was a hard road at first, trying to learn a new craft within the dynamic of a father-son relationship.

“It was a lot of pressure. He is very exacting, too,” Gardner says.

Now 10 years later, Gardner has built nearly 400 of the signature Cedar Mountain Banjos—more than three times the number his dad ever built, mostly because his dad was a slave to the office side of the business.

“For a long time I thought, ‘I don’t want to be a business owner and work for myself.’ I just wanted a pay check,” Gardner recalls.

Gardner’s father soon started dropping hints, however, nudging Gardner to get out from behind the workbench and take a more active role in running the company. But Gardner was content to be craftsman while his dad played the businessman. His life was in a sweet spot. A master banjo builder by day and bluegrass fiddler by night, Gardner was living the musician’s dream. He bounced from bar gigs and picking circles to concert halls and festival stages.

The day of reckoning finally came, however.

“He eventually said, ‘I’m out, Tim. If you want this to keep going you have to take over,’” Gardner recalls.

The post-college revelry was waning by then anyway. He was married with a child in the cards, and decided the time was right.

Cedar Mountain Banjos is now headquartered on the first-floor of Gardner’s house outside Brevard. A true home studio, wayward Legos sneak down the stairs and streamers from his daughter’s birthday party the week before still flutter from the doorway. He’s hasn’t given up his fiddling career either, with shows still covering his calendar.

Gardner’s making about 30 banjos a year these days. He could do more, but it’s a lifestyle choice to carve out time for his family and his own musical interests.

As for the banjos, the original design refined by his father—a model Gardner calls Vintage Cedar Mountain—needs no improvement. Aside from the construction technique, the beauty lies in the proportions: the rim thickness, the neck taper, the peg head size, the heel joinery. 

But Gardner has put his own stamp on the Cedar Mountain Banjo line nonetheless. One of his additions is the Bella Rosa, which pushes the boundaries of his father’s open-back clawhammer classic. Gardner calls it a crossover banjo, with a brighter bell-like tone suited for a range of playing styles, from bluegrass finger picking to old-time strumming.

He’s also developed the Bungalow model, inspired by the historic arts-and-crafts style of bungalows widespread throughout the Asheville region. Created with eco-friendly traits in mind, it uses domestic, locally sourced wood, and skips the typical shell inlay on the neck.

Cedar Mountain stands behind its solid craftsmanship with a lifetime warrantee. Gardner would make it longer than that if he could. He hopes every banjo he makes will be a family heirloom one day, passed down through the generations like the craft his father passed down to him.

More Music Makers

• Devoting a lifetime to the most traditional of Appalachian instruments, Jerry Read Smith has been making hammer and mountain dulcimers in Black Mountain, North Carolina, for more than 40 years. Stop in to his store, Song of the Wood, and you can try your hand at more than 15 dulcimer models, along with unique instruments like the Celtic harp or cane flute. Smith is one of the few luthiers keeping the heritage of psalteries alive, an medieval ancestor of the dulcimer. songofthewood.com. 
• What good’s a banjo without a Capo Caddy? Hatfield Music Banjo Supplies in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, is home to a unique collection of banjo accessories by Jack Hatfield, including banjo practice boards, pick pouches, anti-gravity straps, and pick-ups. Hatfield is a banjo legend—as a musician, an inventor, a teacher, an author, an historian, a composer, a luthier, and influential leader in the preservation of traditional music. hatfieldmusic.com.
• A luthier of the finest order, Bob Kogut makes violins out of Lenoir, North Carolina. Kogut builds his fiddles to carry a rich, sweet, deep tone—shunning the stereotype of a shrill or squeaky instrument even in a beginner’s hands. Kogut names each fiddle he makes, and for custom jobs comes up with the name in concert with its owner-to-be. A testament to his reputation, a Kogut Violin is auctioned every  year at Merlefest. webpages.charter.net/koguts.

Weaver of Heritage: Susan Leveille

Cradled in the corner window of her riverfront studio, Susan Leveille glides her nimble hands over her loom like the eddies rolling down the Tuckasegee in the distance.

There’s a mesmerizing cadence to the craft: the soft clack of the petals lifting and lowering the heddle, the gentle lapping of the header against the warp, the swish of the shuttle tossed deftly through the maze of threads, all the while towing a thin cotton strand that’s along for the ride.

Leveille often gets lost in her own weaving, the worries of the world melting away as she focuses solely on the fabric furling from her fingertips.

“If I am thinking about what I am going to make for supper, then I’ll look back and have made a mistake. Detail matters. One thread wrong, and it will be there in the cloth forever,” says Leveille, a master weaver and the owner of Oaks Gallery in Dillsboro, North Carolina.

Leveille’s mountain roots go back generations, her ancestors settling in the Cartoogechaye community of neighboring Macon County before the Civil War.

In those days, weaving was a necessity. The loom was a household fixture, as ubiquitous as a washboard or ax. 

“They had to weave everything that was textile in their home—the diapers for their babies, the sheets on their bed, the clothes on their back, the curtains at the windows, the cloth to dry the dishes with,” Leveille says.

Nonetheless, weaving became an outlet for artistic expression, even for the poorest substance settlers. “It was a necessity first and foremost, but mankind has forever wanted to have things of beauty around him,” Leveille says.

Household fabric production was the single most time-consuming task for Appalachian women: raising the flax or sheep to make fibers, spinning the thread, weaving the cloth, gathering roots and bark for dye, and finally sewing the garments by hand.

So when the industrial revolution finally reached the mountains, the family loom was quickly forsaken for store-bought cloth. Within a single generation, weaving nearly became a lost art, until its rediscovery during the craft revival of the 1920s.

Leveille’s great aunt, Lucy Morgan, was a pioneer of that movement. After learning to weave at Berea College in Kentucky in the early 1920s, Morgan came back to the mountains of North Carolina and started the Penland Weavers, a cottage industry that helped impoverished Appalachian women bootstrap their way to a better life.

Morgan later founded the fabled Penland School of Crafts outside Linville, North Carolina, where traditional Appalachian handicrafts were taught to a new generation of makers. One by one, Morgan’s sisters made the pilgrimage to Penland to learn the traditional craft of weaving, and a family of weavers was born.

“If Aunt Lucy hadn’t started the school, would we have had all the weavers in the family?” Leveille wonders. 

Leveille learned the craft as a child, when an aunt showed up to live with them, her loom in tow. She set it up in a spare room, where Leveille spent hours watching her. 

“I was just mesmerized,” Leveille recalls. When her aunt married and moved away, she left the loom behind, threaded with yards and yards of thread—called the warp—for Leveille to weave away on.

But eventually, the warp ran out, and Leveille was crushed. Threading a loom was a complicated, technical job, and Leveille hadn’t learned that part. Just 11 years old, Leveille begged her father to send her to Penland for a weaving class so she could learn how to set a loom.

She wove a set of placemats that week that her mother was still using at 90.

Leveille’s family serves as a testament to the power of the craft revival movement to lift up the Appalachian economy. Her father put himself through college and medical school during the 1930s as a pewtersmith, a craft he learned as a teenager at none other than Penland. 

“It was his bread and butter, his only source of income,” Leveille says. 

When Leveille’s father came back home to the mountains, his day job as a cardiologist left him little time for pewter work. But he held fast to the family’s craft legacy.  He opened a working studio, Riverwood Pewter, in Dillsboro and taught the trade to local crafters who then ran the shop. Leveille's sister eventually took up the mantle of the pewtersmithing, and for years the sisters worked next door to each other in the collection of galleries and working craft studios known as Riverwood Shops in Dillsboro, where Leveille's Oaks Gallery is still housed today.

Leveille was immersed in handicraft circles as a child, traipsing along with her father to weeklong fairs of the Southern Highlands Craft Guild. 

“We saw people tying lace fringes and making pottery and carving blocks for block printing. I just thought everybody knew how to do all that stuff,” Leveille says. “I thought everybody had hand-forged andirons in the fireplace, handmade white oak baskets to hold the kindling, handwoven scarves on each dresser, hand-embroidered linens on the table.”

Leveille has thought a lot about why the Southern Appalachians were such a fertile ground for the craft revival movement. Part must lie with the mountains themselves, she thinks. An unspoken force binds the generations, transcending past, present, and future through the shared heritage of a timeless landscape.

Isolation was likely a factor as well. “That in and of itself meant skills were kept alive,” Leveille says.

But the culture of craft was also preserved out of economic necessity.

“Part of it was the Depression came along, and anything you could do to earn 20 cents was worth doing,” Leveille says.

And thanks to tourism, there was a ready-made market. 

“All of that came together to make this the craft mecca of the United States,” she says.

Leveille received the North Carolina Heritage Award in 2014, in part for her artistry but also for advocacy of heritage crafts. Once more following in Aunt Lucy’s footsteps, Leveille’s taught scores of weaving courses and workshops over the past four decades.

“I realized it had been passed down to me and I should do the same,” she says.

More Textile Artisans

• Catharine Ellis, a fiber artist in Waynesville, North Carolina, specializes in natural dying techniques and unique weave patterns, including a line of Appalachian-inspired landscape tapestries. An innovator, instructor, and leader in the fiber arts community, Ellis’ varied projects of late range from teaching natural dyeing in Guatemala to the development of specialty Jacquard fabric for the Oriole Mill in Hendersonville, North Carolina. ellistextiles.com.
• Amber Jensen is a fabric designer, weaver, and  seamstress  with a signature production line called Sketchbook bags and backpacks—each one cut, assembled, sewn, punched, riveted, and lined by her two hands. Jensen has masterfully created colorways, textures, and designs that are both nostalgic and trendsetting, a blend of rural Appalachia and urban hipster. Her studio overlooks the French Broad River in Marshall, North Carolina, occupying a historic high school that’s been converted into an artists co-op. Aside from her bag line, Jensen dapples in various textile projects, including portfolio bags for The Wool Lab based in Prato, Italy. sketchbookcrafts.com.