Tourists and Trade: Roadside Craftsmen and the Highway Transforming Craft

Bruce A. Austin

jun 2023 · State University of New York Press

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Amid the economic turmoil of the Great Depression, in 1929, Clarence Wemett, an upstate New York petroleum merchant, underwrote a craft shop bordering U.S. Route 20 and, a few years later, a different one 15 miles away. At precisely the wrong time for such things to happen, the improbable idea of selling discretionary goods targeted to a consumer market characterized by 25 percent unemployment at a rural highway's roadside achieved traction: the first shop was in business for a quarter century, the second for nearly 40 years. More significant than their surprising longevity is the shops' long-lasting contribution to a nascent, national movement that spans crafts personally created for individual use to the commercial work that sees craft elevated to a fine art—craft objects moved from pantry shelves to museum vitrines and craftworkers from hobbyists to professionals. The roadside shops introduced a business model that, 70 years later, is widely experienced on a very different but equally "super" highway, the Internet, and their story is a chapter in the pre-history of the modern crafts movement.

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Bruce A. Austin is Professor in the School of Communication at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is the author of A Symbiotic Partnership: Marrying Commerce to Education at Gustav Stickley's 1903 Arts & Crafts Exhibitions and Frans Wildenhain, 1950–75: Creative and Commercial Ceramics at Mid-Century; and editor of Imagine This! RIT's Innovation + Creativity Festival.