Handwoven rugs. Wood carvings. Pottery. Cherokee baskets.

The arts and crafts of Southern Appalachia have become treasures for many museums and homes throughout the nation. Strange as it may seem, these works of art and functionality could have been lost to the modern industrial age when urban factories began mass-producing items that cottage industries had traditionally made.

Historians today look at the Craft Revival from the 1890s to the 1940s as a significant movement that popularized and celebrated handicrafts as a return to these traditional art forms to honor craft making, promote tourism and build community pride. The Craft Revival also led to the founding of such notable Western North Carolina craft institutions as the John C. Campbell Folk School, the Penland School of Crafts, and the Southern Highland Craft Guild.

Anna Fariello, a research associate professor at Western Carolina University, compares the Craft Revival to the Harlem Renaissance in that it created a great public response for distinct art forms.

Fariello directs the Craft Revival Project at Western Carolina as part of a North Carolina State Library grant-funded program that is helping to document and examine the cultural legacy of Western North Carolina’s role in this movement.

A major component of her work has been to collaborate with a series of “Heritage Partners” such as John C. Campbell Folk School, the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, Penland School of Crafts, Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual, Southern Highlands Craft Guild, WCU Mountain Heritage Center and WCU’s Special Collections at the Hunter Library.

After gathering photos and research, Fariello and a team of WCU librarians helped launch a Web site — http://craftrevival.wcu.edu — as a digital archive on the Craft Revival. There are links to various sites that help tell the story through photos and text.

“The project is more than the images that we mount,” said Dana Sally, dean of library services at WCU.

There are essays, lesson plans, links, Web resources and bibliography listings to put the history into a cultural context, so an individual can navigate through it at a pace he or she can feel comfortable with — without being bombarded by too much information.

There are some 3,000 items in the database at this point.

“We’re adding to it all the time,” Fariello said. “It’s been a work in progress.”

The ContentDM software allows archivers to catalogue the images in a database and mount digital projects on the Internet for a worldwide audience. Teachers, students, researchers and Web surfers all over the globe can use it for free. Fariello and her colleagues also helped train staff at various sites throughout the region to use the information for future reference so the project can live on well after the grant expires.

No doubt, there were some kinks to work out at first. Some of the sites didn’t have Internet access or up-to-date computers to handle the software. The grant has helped to pay for computers, scanners, printers, software training and Internet access.

“Now we’re kind of in our stride,” said Jill Ellern, a systems librarian at WCU’s Hunter Library who helped launch the Craft Revival Web site. “It really shows what libraries can do. It was a great collaborative effort.”

One of the essays included on the Web site offers insights about the roots of the Craft Revival.

These roots, Fariello explains in the essay, go back to England, where writers such as Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and William Morris championed crafts and the value of the human hands that made them.

“All work, even cotton spinning is noble,” Carlyle wrote in 1843.

Though industrialists argued that machines would make life easier by shortening the time it would take to produce materials, farm the land and travel, art critic and philosopher John Ruskin questioned whether society would truly benefit. As cities swelled with eager job-seekers, disease and crime ran rampant, pollution fouled the air, and factories exploited children and adults in soulless sweatshops over long workdays. Mass-produced items emphasized quantity over quality, and a division of labor within the factory took away the worker’s joy of seeing a product made from start to finish.

In short, Ruskin asked, what is the cost of progress? It’s a question that still haunts the high-tech societies of the 21st century. While machines — and now computers — seem to make life easier, there’s always a cost attached.

Southern Appalachia may have seemed geographically isolated from the teachings of Ruskin, but Fariello has found in her research that some of the leaders of the Craft Revival movement had visited Europe and were versed in the ideas of Ruskin and his disciple William Morris. Magazines and later radio would bring the news from around the world, and settlement schools became community hubs for sharing and spreading information.

“The founders of the Craft Revival in Appalachia observed each other and learned from each other’s experiences via a network that linked settlement schools to production centers and to craftsmen, in spite of the lack of modern communications and transportation systems,” Fariello states in her essay.

The Craft Revival flourished with two ideals in mind — celebrate the craft and enjoy the art process as it helps to enhance the life of its maker. It’s a philosophy that continues today in the craft studios and schools scattered throughout Southern Appalachia.

For more information about the Craft Revival, go to http://craftrevival.wcu.edu.