When I lift the bottom section of my first-ever handmade basket — a Smoky Mountain tote — and display its crosshatch of inch-wide rattan stakes, my instructor offers neither praise nor criticism. Instead, Mary Brandenburg, a third-generation weaver raised on a Pennsylvania farm, quotes her grandfather: "He used to say, ‘A basket can't have any holes big enough for cracked corn.' I haven't fed a chicken for years, but I think about that every time I weave."

Here at the John C. Campbell Folk School, in the mountain burg of Brasstown, North Carolina, everything is touched by the unseen hand of the past. This isn't a school in the conventional sense. For starters, it's full of adults. There are almost no written lessons, no grades, and no papers. The learning is hands-on in such subjects as crafts, music, nature studies, cooking, gardening, dance, and basketry. Competition is taboo. School director Jan Davidson calls the classes an antidote to the "hard-driven, often dehumanizing regimentation of much of today's world." That's why I'm here — to escape the workaday world (and my two exhausting but adorable children) by spending the entire weekend making something with my hands.

Founded in 1925, the Campbell Folk School was modeled after the folkehojskole, or folk schools, of Denmark, which launched in the late 19th century to help preserve rural Danish culture. Missionary and educator John C. Campbell dreamed of creating a similar institution to support the tradition-rich farming communities of the Appalachian Mountains. When he died in 1919, his wife, Olive Dame Campbell, along with Marguerite Butler and the residents of Brasstown, worked to make his dream a reality, opening the school six years later. Today, the nonprofit center is more popular than ever, drawing adults from the United States and abroad to its hemlock- and rhododendron-nestled cabins, crafts studios, and meeting halls.