Susan Leveille: Woven into the Mountains
This story was reported and photographed while conducting fieldwork for South Arts’ ‘In These Mountains’ initiative.
Susan and Bob Leveille park in a lot in the town of Sylva, North Carolina, to enjoy their favorite food truck and brewery. Susan walks down the sidewalk past a sign commemorating Sylva’s first movie theatre, with Bob slowly following behind. Recent medical issues have affected his back and legs. Bob steps up to the bar; he can’t remember what beer he drinks.
Susan Leveille grew up near Sylva in a town called Webster.
“I was three when we moved here,” Susan said. “My dad always said we moved election year, 1952. My folks rented a place in the area that, at the time, was known as Moody Bottom, right on the edge of Sylva just beyond the paper mill.”
Susan Leveille has dedicated her life to preserving the history and craft of textiles of Western North Carolina. The history of this region is full of communities that at one time depended heavily on making and selling textile goods to make ends meet. Women in the mountains, in the past couple of centuries, have been the makers of everyday cloth needs in their communities. Everything from diapers, towels, and clothes was made on an outstretched loom warp, only after spinning raw material into yarn. When stores began to populate the area women were able to barter or pay for ready-made material to be turned into cloth.
“It was just subsistence farming here,” Leveille said. “There was no way to really make any cash; you bartered for things, or you produced them yourself.”
Subsistence life on homesteads gave way to the industrial revolution, pulling young men and women out of the mountains to work in mill towns to earn cash.
“You know as any young person, you hope you get whisked away to somewhere romantic,” Leveille said. “It didn’t take me long to realize that I was very glad I was still here. I think that’s a family, a DNA, kind of thing that happens with generation after generation of loving the mountains.”
Susan’s great-aunt, Lucy Calista Morgan, sought to bring economic relief to their mountain community by creating a cottage industry where women could sell their crafts to buyers outside of the area.
“There was nothing here in these mountains until we got public education,” Leveille said. “Unless somebody, a school, a church, or whatever, set up some kind of private school.”
Morgan had picked up traditional weaving methods from Berea College while pursuing craft knowledge there for three months.
“She had fallen in love with the idea of teaching the women of her community how to weave,” Leveille said.
Morgan brought these newfound skills back to her community and started the Penland School of Crafts.
Despite this region lacking access to public schooling for generations, Leveille recalls a story of one of her grandmothers holding a child at her breast, another in her lap, and the rest playing on the floor as she read Charles Dickens to them.
Leveille’s father, Ralph Siler Morgan, was a native to western North Carolina and attended UNC-Chapel Hill for his undergraduate degree. He paid for his education by making pewter plates and dinnerware, which he learned to make at the Penland school. He became a physician after receiving his education in Chicago; “he said it was the coldest years of his life,” Leveille said.
In the fall of 1967, Leveille started her educational journey outside of her mountain home at Peace College (now William Peace University), a two-year, private, women's college located in Raleigh, North Carolina.
“At that time it was a step above finishing school,” Leveille said.
Leveille finished her associates in home economics, mostly keeping to herself; “my upbringing was not like those girls,” Leveille said. “I didn’t grow up with that kind of money. I was privileged in lots of ways but I didn’t have my portrait painted for the living room.”
Susan met Bob Leveille while attending the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, “I wasn’t in the market at all,” Susan Leveille said and found Bob Leveille to be kind and not pompous. He was quieter than her father. They married in May 1974 before she finished her degree.
Susan Leveille and Bob Leveille operated several businesses over the past 50 years. Their businesses have all been located on the same corner plot in Dillsboro beside Highway 23/441 as it crosses over the Tuckasegee River. A house with auxiliary structures sits on this plot that her parents eventually owned. The original house was built by William Allen Dills, who was the postmaster of the town that would later carry his namesake, Dillsboro. The house was later sold to C. J. Harris, an entrepreneur and contributor to the economic development of Western North Carolina.
Over the years, Harris added onto the historic home, the mismatched floorboards revealing his redesign of the space. Harris’s proudest addition to the home was a three-story tower on the corner with a library parlor that Susan Leveille’s father later clad in wormy chestnut. Only after returning home from an extended trip to see the finished product of his thoroughly designed space did Harris realize he forgot to add a staircase to access the other floors.
Susan and Bob Leveille's first business venture started with a cheese shop called The Cheddar Box in January 1974.
Susan Leveille said that all the cheese that could be found in those early days were big round blocks of “rat cheese, orange food colored cheddar” as she calls it. She said she wanted to introduce the people of the mountains to a wider world of cheeses.
Three years after opening, their successful cheese shop grew into a sandwich shop called The Well House. They started making sandwiches fashioned after Sam & Andy’s sandwich shop in Knoxville, Tennessee, where the steamed sandwich phenomenon was booming.
In the process of operating The Well House, Susan Leveille was teaching weaving classes. This venture would later expand into a gallery called Oaks Gallery that hosted the work of local craftspeople. Susan Leveille saw this as an opportunity much like her great aunt had done before her to help other craft-makers and create a market for their crafts to be sold.
Susan Leveille said Bob “was always supportive of what I was doing. He never wanted me to give up my love for weaving.”
Ever since Bob’s health concerns, her life has changed to be more of a caregiver, but Bob’s encouragement is still the same, “you have to do it,” he said to her. With this change in their lives and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, Susan and Bob Leveille have had to shut down the Oaks Gallery, and the corner plot that hosted them for the past 50 years is posted for sale by the family.
Despite setbacks, Susan still believes in making space to preserve the craft and history of textiles much like those who were living in the mountains before her.
“If you built a loom for somebody in your family, you weren’t building fences,” Susan said. “You weren’t fixing the roof of the barn or other men’s work. You were building a loom. So in that respect, it cost you because maybe you should have been doing something else.”
Susan plans to move her studio operation to her home to be close to Bob and continue teaching these traditions.
“I had been weaving off and on from the time I was in first grade,” Susan said. “One of the things from 20,000 years ago that we still need and we still use—cloth.”
Until then, her looms sit in her den surrounded by clear, plastic bins full of yarn, unfinished projects, and teaching materials, waiting for their warps to be outstretched again.
