Robert Porterfield admires the weavings of Marion Clements.
By Ben Jennings
(Besides being a co-chair of the A! Magazine Committee, Jennings has been on the Board of Directors of the Virginia Highlands Festival for 50 years.)
The Virginia Highlands Festival is celebrating its 75th anniversary this summer as one of the premier arts and culture festivals in the country. Amazingly, the majority of the types of programming from the very first festival in 1949 are still in place in 2024. This year’s festival has an antiques market, an arts and crafts show, an art competition, a historic homes and buildings tour, writing workshops, crafts and antiques lectures and demonstrations, children’s events and outdoor activities. You can see the beginnings of all those events in the first five formative years of the festival, 1949-1953.
The Virginia Highlands Festival of the Arts and Crafts (as it was first called) began as a dream of Robert Porterfield, who founded Barter Theatre in 1933. He hoped that a summer festival would bring additional tourists to Abingdon to boost attendance at Barter Theatre’s Drama Festival, which was a week-long retrospective of all the theatrical performances of Barter’s season.
From its beginnings the programming of the festival had a dual purpose: to bring arts activities and lecturers to Abingdon as well as to celebrate Appalachian cultural traditions.
The central organizers were Porterfield; Sara Joyner, Virginia State Supervisor of Art Education; Ruby Ball and Dixie Lee Wingold, who ran an Abingdon summer “Artists’ Cabin”; and Harold Grogan, the head of the Washington County Development Authority, a forerunner of the Chamber of Commerce.
Ball, an art professor at Virginia Intermont College, and Wingold had connections to the arts and crafts community in the region. Joyner brought knowledge of public education in the arts and a connection to state resources. Grogan connected the fledgling festival to the business community and was the festival’s president for the first three years. Porterfield, besides being an Abingdon community booster, was intimately connected to the New York theater world and could bring to Abingdon many of the most famous figures in American theater of that era.
Porterfield’s vision worked well. The first festival had an estimated 6,000 visitors and 10,000 the second year. The first festival was wide-ranging in its offerings: six days of panel discussions and lectures, antiques and crafts exhibits, music and dance performances, as well as the daily performances at Barter Theatre. There was a “Clothesline Art Show” where local artists could showcase their work—and then it was auctioned off on the last day of the festival.
That initial festival drew statewide attention. An editorial in the Richmond Times-Dispatch noted that the festival “was understood to be the first festival in America with so comprehensive a program. It includes music, painting, drama, folk arts, architecture, interior design and dance.” The writer also stated it was “more ambitious in scope than the one in Salzburg [Austria], which is concerned exclusively with music and drama.”
The second Virginia Highlands Festival of the Arts and Crafts in 1950 expanded on the template that was successful in its first year. The Martha Washington Inn became more fully the heart of the festival. Antiques from leading antique dealers from the region were displayed in the Ballroom, and paintings were displayed in the parlors. Craft demonstrations and exhibits by 40 artisans were displayed in the Red Cross Rooms, including samples of weaving, ceramics, wood crafting, rugs, block printing, leather and metal work, blown glass and decorated china.
Concerts and ballet performances continued, and the Barter Theatre hosted an evening of Native American dance by the Kachina Dancers from Roanoke. Children began to be included in the festival, with music and art workshops and folk dancing on the Martha Washington Inn lawn in the afternoons.
There was a poetry reading by Ruby Altizer Roberts, the poet laureate of Virginia, and a fiction reading by Lucy Herndon Crockett. She was the author of several best-sellers, including “The Magnificent Bastards,” which had been made into the film “The Proud and the Profane” starring William Holden and Deborah Kerr.
Of significance, the Abingdon Jaycees took responsibility for organizing a related event, the first Costume Ball, which was held at the Burley Tobacco Warehouse. Over the next decade, the Costume Ball would be the highlight of the Abingdon community’s involvement in the festival and its opening event.
By the third festival in 1951, the original title had been shortened to “Virginia Highlands Festival of the Arts” and its length had expanded to eight days.
Abingdon has been central to the history of Southwest Virginia, and its preserved Colonial, Federal and Victorian homes and buildings began to be showcased during the festival. The Washington County Historical Society organized a bus tour of historic properties: Brook Hall outside Glade Spring; the Bank/Preston House, Vance’s Tavern, and Acklin in Abingdon; and an artist’s cottage at Virginia Intermont College.
In 1952, the festival expanded to 15 days, which became its length for most of the next 60 years, complementing the expanded Barter Drama Festival.
In the festival’s infancy, it is clear that Robert Porterfield is the force behind the festival. Even though there are presidents and coordinators of the festival, Porterfield was listed as the “Chairman of the Board.” He came up with a unique metaphor for the festival (and for Abingdon) in an introduction to the 1952 festival calendar: “Abingdon — A Cultural Watering Place.” He wrote that the festival had become “what we hoped for several years ago as a cultural watering place where the artists of different fields could drink from the same fountain and be refreshed.”
During the 1952 festival, Richard Chase, one of the most important researchers of Appalachian and American folklore, organized a “festival within a festival.” The event was called a “Folk Arts Workshop” and had workshops on folk games and singing, but especially on folk dancing: square dancing, English folk dancing, rounds and longways country dancing.
When Chase was in Abingdon during the summers, he published several landmark books on American folklore: “Grandfather Tales,” “Hullabaloo and Other Singing Folk Games” and “The Jack Tales.”
In 1953, an arrangement was made with the American Association of University Women in Virginia to sponsor a statewide creative writing contest, with the awards presentations to be held at the annual Virginia Highlands Festival. That collaboration made the Virginia Highlands Festival Creative Writing Contest one of the most prestigious in the country. Judges in the 1950s included Nobel-Prize-winning Pearl Buck and poet John Ciardi.
That same year, as an example of Robert Porterfield’s connections to the New York theater world, he brought Dame Judith Anderson, the most distinguished actress of her era, for a week-long reprise of her role that she had just completed on Broadway, as Mary, the mother of Jesus, in a production of “Family Portrait.” Anderson had played Broadway roles as Gertrude in “Hamlet” opposite both John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier and as Lady Macbeth opposite Maurice Evans.
The Bristol newspaper critic said that he was enthralled by her performance. “I would gladly pay Manhattan prices, $4.80 to $7.20, to have Miss Anderson sit onstage and eat peanuts. You haven’t lived until you have seen Judith Anderson.”
New events in 1953 that would continue through the years included a flower show, photography exhibit and lectures, and the beginning of tours related to natural resources, including a cave tour that year.
By 1954 the festival had settled on the name that has remained for the next 70 years, the Virginia Highlands Festival. With programming extended into outdoor excursions and historical tours, the shortened title was more accurate. The dates of the festival settled on Aug. 1-15 for many years, even though that meant that the festival began on weekdays for many years and moved away from always being concurrent with the Barter Theatre Drama Festival.
It wasn’t until 1960 that the festival became incorporated and filed for non-profit status with the IRS. The supporting organizations--Barter Theatre, the Martha Washington Inn and the Town of Abingdon--financed the festival in its early years, all of whom gained financially from festival attendees.
The model for the Virginia Highlands Festival was designed in its early, formative years, and that model has been the key to the festival’s success until the present day. To see this year’s events, visit www.vahighlandsfestival.org.
