History
The University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service, in an early attempt to preserve the vanishing heritage of the Ozark Mountains, assisted local craftsmen and musicians to form the Ozark Foothills Crafts Guild in 1962. The guild started with 30 members and now consists of over 300 master craftsmen and musicians.
In 1963 the guild, in cooperation with local civic organizations, organized the first Arkansas Folk Festival which attracted approximately 15,000 people. The festival became an annual event and within a few years was attracting almost 100,000 people to Mountain View. Due to the success of the annual festival the guild realized that they needed a permanent home.
The guild, in cooperation with local government, obtained a grant from the United States Economic Development Administration to establish a private commercial craft center at Mountain View. Prior to its opening in 1973 the state of Arkansas recognized the potential of the project and folded the center into the state park system and provided additional funding.
Big people were saved here
Read more about this topic: Ozark Folk Center
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)