SUSAN M. BROOKS Staff

Susan (“Susie”) Brooks was a graduate of the Boston School of Occupational Therapy, but she also had another interest: teaching craft art. When the dean of the Boston School informed her about Pine Mountain Settlement School, she sent a letter of inquiry in April 1933.

Glyn Morris, then the director of the Pine Mountain Settlement School, responded to Brooks, offering a volunteer position for next year. He wrote, “We have some fine weaving equipment here, but have had to dispense with weaving this year because of finances.”

In response to Brooks’ questions, Morris explained that the School would pay her travel expenses, but, as a volunteer, she would not receive a salary, only room and board unless the products of the weaving department sold well. “During the last two years our Fireside Industries department has suffered, but we plan to push this work and advertise it next year, so that it will be a profitable part of our program” and, consequently, a weaving teacher would be needed for fall and winter.

Brooks’ application provided information about her. She was 43 years old and her current address was Wheeling, West Virginia. After completion of training at the Boston School of Occupational Therapy in 1926, she served for five years as an occupational therapy director at Westbrook Sanatorium in Richmond, Virginia.

A reference assured Morris that she was “upright, truthful, industrious.” Another wrote that she was “[q]uiet, pleasing, cooperative.” 

 Morris, in a subsequent letter dated July 3, 1933, asked if Brooks could meet with him “somewhere in West Virginia” to discuss the teaching position. However, it is not known whether this meeting actually took place. Morris also sent her information about PMSS and suggested other resources she could study, such as, the Russell Sage Foundation and Miss Helen Dingman of Berea College, concerning mountain crafts and vegetable dyeing, and “The Southern Highlander and His Homeland” by John C. Campbell.

By early August 1933, Brooks was on a train, bus, and then horse and wagon over the mountain to her new position at Pine Mountain Settlement School.

 A year later, she spent the summer studying at Penland Institute, a center for craft education in North Carolina. She wrote to Morris that she enjoyed her work there and hoped “that what I learn will be of value to me and to the school next winter.”

Fern Hall Hayes, a PMSS office assistant at the time, recalled that Brooks maintained a “blue pot” – a vat of vegetable dye for wool, containing bran and the indigo plant, that needed to be kept at constant temperature. It was located in the weaving room at the Girls’ Industrial Building. 

During Brooks’ last year, 1936, at Pine Mountain, Morris was seeking a way to offset the expenses of the Medical Settlement at Big Laurel, the School’s satellite operation. One possible solution was to set up a local industry at the satellite to be funded by a donor who offered “considerable” aid if a “business-like proposition for producing both weaving and handicraft products” could be worked out. Morris, in a letter of January 29, 1936, asked Brooks to obtain the cost of producing weaving items, hoping to “get some of the local women weaving down at Medical Settlement, [which would] enable them to have an income, but also to make the settlement self-supporting.”  

Brooks’ correspondence in the Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections ends with Morris’s letter. Further information about Susan M. Brooks’ life during and after her time at Pine Mountain will be added as it is found or contributed by readers.

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