I am overjoyed to be here today—I’ll be the first to admit that I never saw this moment coming when I was here shoveling a narrow path through the heaviest, dirtiest, sewage-soaked mud just so we could get into this building where the day before the water was five feet deep. Just 972 days ago I stood here, but in the intervening days between July 2022 and April 2025 a miracle occurred. Here we all sit in Creek Hall celebrating that miracle.
Here we sit close by the banks of aptly-named Troublesome Creek that gave this stringed instrument company its distinctive name. Here we sit reflecting on the wondrous transformation and resurrection that took place in Hindman, Kentucky. Here we sit in gratitude for the back-breaking labor and personal sacrifices that ignited the revival of this beloved 1931 former high school building. Here we sit in joyous rapture reveling in the daily work that takes place under this roof where world-class musical instruments are skillfully crafted of beautiful sustainably harvested native wood by dedicated luthiers. Here we sit, in respect and admiration for the triumph of the human spirit that has led these artisans from the darkness of substance addiction to the light of new life revealed through the Culture of Recovery.
The Place
as Jean Ritchie poetically described it:
To stand in the bottom of any of the valleys is to have the feeling of being down in the center of a great round cup. To stand on top of one of the narrow ridges is like balancing on one of the innermost petals of a gigantic rose, from which you can see all around you the other petals falling away in wide rings on the horizon.
(sung) Down in some lone valley, in a lonesome place,
Where the wild birds do whistle,
And their notes do increase….
The People
Most of you are familiar with the names that populate this place: Slone, Ritchie, Hall, Combs, Stacey, Amburgey, Everidge, Stamper, Caudill, Cornett, and others. People whose roots are rooted deeply in the narrow bottomland and cling persistently to the rocky hillsides. Successive generations have nurtured a traditional culture marked by oral history, storytelling, dance, crafts, quilting, basket making, weaving, pottery, and music. When the first rural settlement school was established here in 1902, Katherine Petit, May Stone, and other teachers nurtured and encouraged the local arts and crafts, preserving a culture that was vanishing in the face of 20th century industrial incursions.
The Culture
The dulcimer was enshrined as the Kentucky State Musical Instrument by our Legislature in 2001. The florescence of the dulcimer in late nineteenth-century Hindman could be compared to 18th-century Cremona, Italy, the heart of violin luthiery. Our own Antonio Stradivarius–Uncle Ed Thomas (1850-1933)– created fine instruments distinguished by the characteristic hourglass shape with inverted heart sound holes. Will Singleton built instruments for Jean Ritchie’s family who were neighbors. McKinley Craft fashioned instruments that became the model for the vast McSpadden factory, and Jethro Amburgey, as shop teacher at the Settlement School made thousands of instruments that fueled the dulcimer revival of the 1960s-1980s.
Successive waves of folklorists and collectors, such as Cecil Sharp, John Jacob Niles, and Olive Dame Campbell found their way to Hindman to capture the wealth of venerable balladry and song. Josiah Combs, a graduate of the first Settlement School class, went to Paris, France where he wrote his doctoral thesis on the Folk Songs of the United States (1925), basing his research on music he collected growing up in Knott County. The Settlement School sustained this cultural activity through the twenty-first century through initiatives, such as Family Folk Week, the Kentucky Writer’s Workshop, and the Pick and Bow program.
And this is where the past, present, and future become deliciously entangled. In 2001 Governor Paul Patton in concert with Dr. Jay Box, president of Hazard Community College, provided a Community Development Grant that created a School of Craft located in the renovated former Hindman High School. At the same time, the Appalachian Artisan Center was created to assist artists and artisans in creating an economy based on the traditional heritage associated with mountain culture.
The School never fully lived up to its vision, but the Appalachian Artisan Center continued to develop, providing arts education and a showcase for regional artistry. Doug Naselroad returned to Kentucky and began his service as director of the Appalachian School of Luthiery in 2012. Six years later (2018) something remarkable occurred as two entities from seemingly different planets fortuitously intersected. As the Knott County Drug Court and Hickory Hill Recovery Center were engaged in a struggle to contain rampant opiate addiction, the Appalachian Artisan Center’s School of Luthiery was engaged in crafting dulcimers modeled after Uncle Ed Thomas’s instruments and teaching folks how to build these instruments. These two were united in felicitous union as the AAC implemented the “Culture of Recovery” program that paved the way for folks that had successfully completed Hickory Hill’s treatment to receive training at the School of Luthiery.
The next step was the creation of the Troublesome Creek String Instrument Company located in the repurposed School of Craft in this very building. Those that mastered the woodworking skills and remained sober were hired by the factory to produce world class guitars, mandolins, ukuleles, and dulcimers that are in great demand. Music and mission are both served, as instruments of great beauty are created while human lives are resurrected.
But then the flood descended on Knott County in July 2022– twelve inches of violent rain in a matter of a few deadly hours. The town of Hindman was completely inundated; the factory was destroyed. Yet despair yielded to faith and hope. Doug said “God will show us a way.” And this is the miracle. 972 days after the floods decimated the factory, it has been restored, refashioned, redesigned, and renovated in generous collaboration with Hazard Community and Technical College, which gave ownership of the entire building to the Appalachian Artisan Center for the use of Troublesome Creek String Instrument Company. And we, as Noah, watching the flood waters recede, are granted the beauty of a rainbow sign, a covenant. Here we all sit in Creek Hall celebrating that miracle. Hallelujah!
— Dr. Ron Pen
Clark County, KY
March 31, 2025