Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area
Peters Valley: From Farm Village to Craft Community
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Transcript
Peters Valley demonstrates another way an old place survives.
The settlement once known as Bevans developed as a small agricultural community.
Today many of its historic buildings support the Peters Valley School of Craft.
That reuse matters.
A historic building without a function can become expensive scenery.
A building with a compatible new use has a better chance of staying alive.
Studios, workshops and craft education gave the village another reason to exist.
There is something fitting about making things here.
The Delaware Valley's history is full of practical skills: farming, milling, blacksmithing, carpentry, weaving, stonework.
The modern school is not reenacting that old economy, but it continues the idea that knowledge can live in hands as well as books.
Craft education also changes the visitor relationship with heritage.
Instead of asking you only to look backward, Peters Valley asks what traditional and contemporary making can do now.
That makes it unusually alive for a historic district.
A blacksmithing studio or ceramics workshop is not pretending the nineteenth century never ended.
It is using old buildings to support twenty-first-century creative work.
That kind of adaptive reuse may be one of the most durable forms of preservation because it creates new memory instead of only curating old memory.