Southern Crafted Joins Helene Recovery Effort

The Bull Street home goods shop is on a mission to help rebuild Asheville’s River Arts District

Written by LOLA JARZEMSKY and MARGARET DANIEL

HUSBAND AND WIFE TEAM Ashley and Deborah McCorkle conceived Southern Crafted as a love letter to their region. Featuring the works of the area’s preeminent creatives hailing from the Lowcountry to the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, the Bull Street shop offers handsome, hand-turned knives and bowls, metalworks and remarkable glassware meant for gifting and everyday acts of Southern hospitality. In an increasingly automated world, their store offers a respite from cool modernity, providing practical objets d’art bursting with warmth and ingenuity. 

The couple sprang into action when they heard about Hurricane Helene’s destruction of Asheville and the nearby Penland School of Craft, pledging 10% of their glassware sales through the end of the year to initiatives for rebuilding the famed River Arts District.

Now their Christmas ornaments, barware and art pieces are directly helping the broader Asheville community and the artists their store represents, like second-generation glassblower Hayden Wilson and silversmith Adam Whitney, an artist in residence at the Penland School of Craft.

“Western North Carolina and the Appalachians are the heart of handmade craftsmanship, including furniture. It’s where it all began in the U.S.,” Ashley says. “We want to help them out in any way we can, and they are really going to need it when the news cycle has turned over to something else. They will still be rebuilding far beyond November and December.” 

Most River Arts makers and Asheville residents still lack electricity, drinking water, internet and phone service. Compounding the devastation, leaf peeping is off the table for tourists without the infrastructure to support them. 

“The fall season is when local Blue Ridge merchants make a good deal of their money because tourists come for the fall colors, but they are all shut down, without basic services and not getting the bulk of their money. It would be like Savannah suffering a hurricane in April,” Ashley says. “Quite a few people we’ve talked to moved from coastal areas in Florida to get away from hurricanes, but the weather came in search of them.”

“Western North Carolina and the Appalachians are the heart of handmade craftsmanship, including furniture. It’s where it all began in the U.S. We want to help them out in any way we can, and they are really going to need it when the news cycle has turned over to something else. They will still be rebuilding far beyond November and December.”

— Ashley McCorkle

Asher Holman, owner of Asheville-based shop Small Batch Glass, echoes this sentiment and dedication to his community. “Not having the ability to work and the usual traffic we rely on is going to be hard on everyone here, myself included. I’m getting ready to button things up at my shop and help the community in any way I can — including donating a percentage of my sales to local organizations.”

As a proud Southerner and maker, Ashley emphasizes the impact shopping local and handmade has in the wake of disaster and its power as a safeguard against globalization’s erosion of regional culture. 

“I think Southerners are so house proud of being Southern. We have such a distinct culture, and we like to revel in that. There is nothing more disappointing than finding a beautiful oyster plate and turning it over [to see] ‘Made in China.’ There is such irony in that, and it seems inauthentic,” Ashley bemoans. “These plates are so culturally significant to this 200-mile radius, but it’s been commodified and made overseas. Our oyster plates are made up the road in Memphis, Tennessee, by Melissa Bridgman.”

“We are focused on selling to Southerners — and Savannah’s many visitors — things that resonate with our shared cultural experience as people who grew up or [who] live in the South,” says Ashley. “And the best way to do that is to work with makers who live here and are inspired by the place where they live to provide things we use every day in our home.”

Instead of shopping big box, the McCorkles encourage going small batch this holiday season — trimming the tree, stocking your bar and gifting your friends with handmade goodies that can give back to their makers and beyond — boosting economies like Asheville and Chimney Rock and preserving a tradition of Southern craft at schools like Penland and Berea College. If you have already checked your list twice, consider giving back to the couple’s favorite organizations offering tangible relief to North Carolinians whose holiday plans and livelihoods were upended by Hurricane Helene.