High Rocks 2023 Folk Arts & Culture Classes

I recently sat down with Casey Withers, Farm Manager for the High Rocks Academy, to talk about the upcoming Folk Arts & Culture classes to be held at various locations in Pocahontas and Greenbrier counties.

“This is a folk arts and workshop series that High Rocks is facilitating and it’s in partnership with Berea College, where it’s headquartered through,” said Withers. “We get the opportunity to run some workshops here. They’re mostly in Pocahontas County, but a couple of them are in Lewisburg at the Hub café this year.”

“The topic for us is mainly food; it’s focused on Appalachia traditions and trying to get people of all ages involved in these workshops, passing on knowledge on how things have worked.”

The first workshop is coming up on Saturday, March 18^th, which is also the second West Virginia Mountain State Maple Day for 2023. Casey gives more details on the Maple Magic workshop to be held at Fort Warwick sugar camp in Green Bank.

“We kind of start that off with maple syrup and jump onto the second half of Mountain State Maple Days,” he said. “There’s a lot going on there that day – High Rocks will be there kicking off our folk arts and workshop series, hosting some kids activities that are based around maple production.”

Fort Warwick will be hosting an open house that day and the Pocahontas County Farmers Market will be hosting a maple brunch from 9am to Noon as a fundraiser for the upcoming markets later this year.  Tickets for the brunch can be purchased in advance and are $18.00 for adults and $10.00 for children 5 to 12 years old.  You can find more information about the brunch at PCFM on Facebook.

Additional workshops will run throughout March, April and May and most will be led by High Rocks staff.  One popular upcoming workshop will be led by an outside instructor towards the end of March.

“This will be the third year that we’ve done this workshop and it takes place on Saturday, March 25^th, it’s at Knapps Creek Trout Lodge.  They host that and teach people how to clean and prepare their fish.  We’ll have trout brought in from Mountain State hatchery out of Pendleton County and the participants in that workshop they’ll get to see a trout cleaned and then get a cleaned trout.  They’ll essentially prepare the trout, cook it and eat it, so it’s a pretty fun one for people.”

“That one is one of the [workshops] that we do have space limitations, so there are two sessions on the 25^th, 11am to 1pm or 3pm to 5pm. We do want people to pre-register for that one. You can call 304-653-4891, that’s the number to High Rocks to register. And all of these workshops are free.”

Other workshops include cooking with ramps, making pepperoni rolls, how to find Morel mushrooms and how to inoculate a log to grow your own shitake mushrooms.  You can find the full list of High Rocks workshops at https://highrocks.org/calendar/upcoming-events.