Marshall's Main Street Gallery Is Holding the Flood and the Barns at the Same Time This Fall

The photographs started with a shovel. During the first months after Hurricane Helene, Lauren Rutten was volunteering downtown, clearing mud out of the flooded Marshall High Studios. She noticed the marks the river had left behind and photographed them between loads. Those pictures now hang at the Madison County Arts Council, 90 South Main Street, in an exhibition called Save This Piece.

Starting Friday, October 23, a second show opens in the same building. The Appalachian Barn Alliance's "Barns of Madison County & Beyond" brings painting and photography of the county's old barns to Main Street. The two shows overlap from October 23 through November 14, a little over three weeks.

One show is about a flood and the other is about farm buildings, and both do the same work. Each records the physical evidence of a place before it's gone.

What the river left, traced in gold

Save This Piece has 24 large abstract photographs. They aren't pictures of wreckage. They show the silt, rust, mud and changed surfaces Helene left across downtown Marshall. Rutten finished each print with hand-drawn lines of 24-karat gold leaf that follow the course of the French Broad River. According to the Arts Council's exhibition page, the gold comes from kintsugi, the Japanese practice of mending broken objects with gold instead of hiding the cracks.

On that same page, the Arts Council quotes Rutten describing what she was after:

"I wasn't interested in documenting disaster as much as paying attention to what remained. These photographs ask how beauty continues to exist alongside grief, and how a community slowly reimagines itself after profound change."

The photographs hang alongside writings from more than 150 local residents and volunteers. Those pieces were collected at a writing event held on the first anniversary of the flood. The collection is still growing. With the flood's second anniversary passing this fall, visitors can leave their own written reflections in the gallery, and those become part of the project. The Arts Council describes the show as a step toward a book that will combine the photographs and the community writing.

So a visit to Save This Piece lets you add to the record as well as look at it. If you lived through the fall of 2024 here, there's a place in this room for what you remember. The exhibit closes Saturday, November 14.

The barns were being written down first

The Appalachian Barn Alliance began this kind of work more than a decade before the flood. The group formed in 2012 to document historic barn-building traditions and the barns themselves. According to the ABA's own description of its mission, the goal is to preserve Madison County's rural heritage "for future generations."

The ABA's county inventory counts more than 10,000 barns across Madison County, and its documentation covers 11 townships. Selected barns are recorded with measurements, materials, architectural sketches, data sheets and photographs. That's a field survey, and it works the same way Rutten's camera did in the flooded studio: get the evidence down while it can still be read.

The exhibit opening at the Arts Council on October 23 is the public, gallery side of that survey. The Arts Council's event listing names the artists: Woody Eisenberg, Kris Cassidy, Louise Scruggs, Bonnie Cooper, Tucker Hibbits, Ed Tucker, Cecil Bothwell, Alex Webber, Patty Kehoe, David Blanke and Joanna Karpay. The opening reception runs from 5 to 8 p.m., and the show stays up through November 21.

The barn show isn't new. A 2023 piece in The Laurel of Asheville described the Barns of Madison County exhibition as an annual event until COVID interrupted it. This year it shares the building with the newest record of what can happen to a place, which it hasn't done before.

Why the documentation matters: some of the barns are already gone

The ABA's Laurel Township records show why the work has a deadline. The William "Will" Cook barn on Highway 212 stood at the crossroads community of Belva. It was a 1920s livestock and equipment barn framed entirely in hemlock, which is unusual for a barn, and it carried an old billboard advertisement on one wall. It collapsed in 2016. The ABA notes it came down "luckily after it was documented."

The Richard Franklin barn sat on the south-facing slope of the Big Laurel Creek valley. It was a late 19th-century livestock barn with hewn timbers, the family's children's initials carved into a log wall, and hay racks of split stake palings. It was taken apart and rebuilt somewhere else in Madison County.

So the barn record and the flood record both answer the same question. When a building goes, whether by weather, a river or a move, someone has to have written down what was there.

Taking the gallery out on the road

You can drive the barn show too. The ABA has published self-guided driving-tour brochures for six townships: Beech Glen, Laurel, Spring Creek, Walnut, Mars Hill and South Marshall. The Laurel Historic Barn Tour brochure lays out a drive of about two hours:

1. Head out on Big Laurel Road.
2. Turn onto Spillcorn Road.
3. Continue along NC 212 through Shelton Laurel.

Along the way the brochure points out barns including the Jack Wallin, Eason Tweed, Delbert Shelton and Gaither Shelton barns.

Two cautions before you go. The brochure carries a 2014 copyright, and the Cook and Franklin barns above show how much a route can change in ten years. Check the current Laurel Township inventory before you rely on any stop. The brochure also asks drivers to stay off private property, driveways included, and to stop only where it's safe. These barns are on working land and people's homeplaces. You see them from the road.

If you'd rather stay closer to Marshall, the ABA's Walnut Township inventory lists barns such as Claude Wild's on Big Pine Road and Fidel Baker's on Barnard Road.

One order works well. See the paintings and photographs on Main Street first, then drive out and find the real barns, and the gallery work will make more sense on the road.

The three-week window, on a calendar

The Arts Council is open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. That leaves four Saturdays when both shows are up, plus the weekdays in between.

The Downtown Marshall Association calls Safe Treat an annual event, with local businesses giving children a safe trick-or-treat route down Main Street. It's the evening of October 31, a Saturday this year, and the gallery's Saturday hours end that afternoon. You can see the shows and come back downtown for trick-or-treating on the same day.

The ABA lists a Barn Photo Workshop offered by Woody Eisenberg on November 6 and 7. Eisenberg is also one of the artists in the barn exhibit. The annual meeting on November 9 is open to the public. It's a good way to meet the people who keep the inventory and to ask how a barn gets documented.

For lunch, the Downtown Marshall Association's directory lists Zuma Coffee & Provisions and Madco Pizza & Brewing among its downtown food and drink spots.

What the overlap gives you

After November 14, the flood photographs come down and the barns stay up one more week. Until then, one stop on South Main Street covers both records. One is a new archive of silt lines on downtown walls, and it's still taking written contributions. The other is a decade of measurements, sketches and photographs of barns, a few of which now exist only on paper.

Old barns and outbuildings are part of what you're getting when you own or buy land in Madison County. If you'd like to talk about the history of a piece of land you own or are thinking about buying, from its barns and outbuildings to how it fits the county around it, Andy Ball is glad to have that conversation. Let's Connect.