Settlement School Dormitories and Dwellings Historic District

Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts is an Arts and Crafts center in the U.S. city of Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The oldest craft school in Tennessee, Arrowmont offers workshops in arts and crafts such as painting, woodworking, drawing, glass, photography, basket weaving, ceramics, fiber arts, book arts and metalworking. The School has an 11-month Artists-in-Residence program for early career artists. Arrowmont's campus contains the oldest buildings in Gatlinburg and comprises two historic districts listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Arrowmont's history is rooted in a settlement school founded by the Pi Beta Phi women's fraternity in Gatlinburg in 1912. The school provided the only public education for children in the Gatlinburg area until Sevier County assumed control of its public schools in the early 1940s. The early writings and reports of the settlement school's teachers provide an important glimpse of Gatlinburg in the days before the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park radically changed the city's economy and culture. Pi Beta Phi helped prime Gatlinburg for the coming tourism boom, and also helped Gatlinburg residents tap into the national market for the crafts of Southern Appalachia with the establishment of Arrowcraft in the 1920s. After the county gained control of the settlement school in 1943, Pi Beta Phi and the University of Tennessee established the craft workshops that evolved into what is now Arrowmont. The school's campus was damaged on November 29, 2016, when a wildfire from the nearby Great Smoky Mountains National Park spread throughout Gatlinburg. Arrowmont lost two dormitories and a maintenance shed. All other buildings were unharmed.