We spent Saturday at the Wooden Boat Show and Summer Solstice Festival at North House Folk School in Grand Marais.
North House says they teach “traditional Northern crafts,” but I like to describe them as a school of pre-industrial technologies. If you want to start with tree and an axe and end with a house, this is the place. The teachers tend toward pragmatism— in general, if the state of the craft has improved since pioneer days, the teachers embrace the improvements.
I used to participate in the weekly community bread-baking in the wood-fired oven:
The community bakes have mostly disappeared for lack of a quorum of local bread zealots (the foremost of which departed to run Farm and Sparrow outside Asheville, NC).
Summer solstice weekend always includes the Wooden Boat Show (in conjunction with the wonderful Wooden Boat Magazine), the Boats to Tools auction, the Chowder Chow-Down (a dozen or so restaurants each bring their favorite chowder. Ten bucks at the door gets you a bowl, a spoon and a napkin), lots of boat-related seminars, and the Solstice Pageant local and visiting families have spent weeks putting together (the pageant director hails from the storied Bread and Puppet / Heart of the Beast social nexus). Here’s the Flickr set.
