Lucy Morgan

The first tiny house of Miss Lucy Morgan

The first tiny house of Miss Lucy Morgan

One of the first things I noticed my first morning at Penland was a new post and beam structure which was sheltering this truck.

Lucy Morgan was quite a woman. She started Penland School of Crafts with her brother Rufus. Rufus soon bowed out, but Lucy spent her life tending the school. It started innocently enough. She taught local women to weave goods to be sold as a way to support their families. Eventually she found herself running a school that taught much more than weaving. 

In the midst of the Depression, there was no money and the students were not coming for classes, so Lucy rounded up the funds to take the below truck and a log cabin building (the first "tiny house"?) all the way to the 1933 Chicago World's Fair to sell the weaving of her Appalachian community. Her weavers wove all winter without pay to make stock for the fair and their gamble paid off. She even got the yarn supplier to give her materials with the promise to pay him back after the fair.