The Michigan Folk School at Staebler Farm County Park is hosting a Folk Festival on Saturday, October 12 from 10am to 3pm. This free event will allow the public to tour the school, enjoy the live music and demonstrations, and learn what the school has to offer through its many classes and workshops.
“The idea is that visitors get to know us and we get to know you,” said Jason Gold, director of the Michigan Folk School and manager of Staebler Farm County Park. “You are going to have educational classes there, you’re going to have food, dance and singing. You are going to have a lot of camaraderie among people discussing not just the history of Staebler Farm but also the folk school movement.”
Demonstrations will include bowl making, blacksmithing, stained glass, leatherworks and willow burial basket weaving. In the kitchen, chefs will be demonstrating everything from cheese making to bread baking.
“It’s really quite a diverse group of instructors all coming together just to give the public a glimpse of what happens inside of a class,” Gold said.
A partnership with Washtenaw County Parks and Recreation
The Michigan Folk School began in 2012, and officially became a part of the Washtenaw County Parks Department in January 2023.
“The folk school movement has been around for about 150 years in this country. It came out of northern Europe as a way of looking at the industrial revolution. They were worried about what was going to happen to the people’s knowledge, how to weave and how to garden, if we just let the machines do it,” Gold said.
In 2015, the school began searching for a permanent place to call home.
“We started searching for our own campus as a non-profit. We looked all over the state of Michigan. It was Washtenaw County Parks and Recreation that came to us in 2016 and said ‘We have 100 acres in Ann Arbor that we have no idea what to do with. We know what we want, we just don’t know how to get it.’”
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The two entities began collaborating in 2017.
“The administration department in Washtenaw and the folk school board both wrote narratives of what we hoped to achieve on this piece of land, and you would’ve thought it was written by the same person. We knew we had a partner and someone we really wanted to travel this road with. In October of 2022, the Washtenaw County commission voted to acquire the Michigan Folk School, and a month later the folk school board voted to be acquired, all unanimous votes. We became an official part of the county on January 1, 2023,” Gold said.
Today, there are over 150 folk schools in the United States that offer classes and workshops to teach handcrafted traditions to a new generation.
The importance of arts and crafts
“I’m always struck that every single day, I come across an article that talks about the healing power of craft, and exactly what this does and how it centers us,” Gold said. “ Pre-COVID, our average age was 55 and our average gender was female. Today, it’s much different. Now the average age is 43. That means so many more young people are looking for something else rather than their computer. They want to do something that brings in the heart and mind at the same time.”
Visitors to the festival can watch a clogging demonstration, listen to a vintage string band or catch a performance from the school’s choral singers while enjoying food from Tacos El Panda food truck or the vegan soup and cornbread from the Dixboro Project. And of course, it wouldn’t be a fall festival without cider and donuts.
Handmade goods will be available at the vendor market and silent auction. Field games and crafts will be available for children.
Gold hopes that visitors to the festival will get a vision of what he calls “ a community of like minded people who could all come together and bring different arts and different crafts to the table and see what we could actually do together.”