Handmade in America

“My great-grandmother Edith started Biltmore Industries, which was an attempt to teach and provide a living to rural women. They started with fine weaving and expanded into other fine things.” I was talking with Jack Cecil, whose great-grandparents were the Vanderbilts who built The Biltmore Estate, a world famous tourist attraction.

I was in Asheville, NC (population 68,889) for a NAIOP meeting this past week, but also spent several days with my wife exploring the downtown area and driving almost 500 miles in the surrounding mountain side towns. I was there specifically to learn more about HandMade in America, (www.handmadeinamerica.org) the most successful regional tourism/economic development program I’ve seen. Asheville is the hub for a 20 county region that has been rejuvenated and expanded because of the HandMade in America program.

Jack Cecil was the chairman of the HandMade initiative when it began in the mid 1990s. He and a small group of regional leaders strategize about what they could do to improve the regions’ economic development prospects. Industrial was out of the question because of the topography which made large scale industrial projects impractical and terribly expensive. There was no competitive advantage that the region could offer in industrial.

Instead Cecil and the HandMade group turned to something that his great grandmother had started doing almost 100 years ago. His great grandfather was George Vanderbilt who built the 250 room Biltmore Estate on 125,000 acres that he assembled in the late 1800s. Jack’s first cousins run the estate which is the largest tourist attraction in the state bringing in over 1 million tourists/year. Jack’s Biltmore Farms (www.biltmorefarms.com) was originally a dairy but is now developing spectacular new towns on some of the land from the original estate. He is also heavily involved in philanthropic work for all of western NC.

HandMade in America found in their assessment of the assets in the region that there were not only a lot of weavers but also painters, pottery makers and also glass blowers. He told me, “We found that we had the fourth highest concentration of artisans in the country, behind only NYC, Seattle and Santa Fe. The area’s economy had been developed around agriculture, primarily tobacco but also crafts which originated out of the Pendland School, a craft school.”

He went on, “We did a craft registry and were able to get the Pew Charitable Trust to fund our efforts to develop this into a trail.” The first project was to put together a book, The Craft Heritage Trails of Western North Carolina, on the numerous artisans in the region. This 250 page book, now in its third printing lists almost 1,000 studios, galleries, schools and other points of interest on eight separate trails in the region.

My wife and I got to do two of the trails and hope to return in the future to do the other six. It was an incredible experience.