TENNESSEE'S CUMBERLAND COUNTRY

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To counter this, the public school system, which has fine physical facilities, has set up an adult literacy program for people 16 or older to teach basic skills from the fourth level down and an adult basic education program for those needing help from the fifth level up. There are also adult vocational night classes in such things as computer information, pre-law enforcement, accounting, and interior decorating, and a public alternative school has recently been set up for those students with learning and social problems. In addition, there are small private schools in the county run by the Quakers and the Mennonites. (At Muddy Pond, just over the county line in Fentress County, a large and friendly Mennonite community, famous for its beautiful crafts and homemade bread and cookies, keeps to the "old ways" of farming and has earned the respect of the local population.) Tennessee Tech is 30 miles away at Cookeville, and it's only an hour's drive to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

The arts and handicrafts thrive in this rural area.

One should note, too, that the Cumberland County Chess Club, begun in 1972 and now with chess classes on every level in the public schools, has won many state and regional team championships and produced the national junior champions in 1982. (It's not unusual to see children deep in their chess games at the 14,000volume Art Circle Public Library, which was formed by a group called the Art Circle in the 1800s.) The school system has a good arts program, and any child would be fortunate to have access to the Cumberland County Playhouse, which is designated as a Major Cultural Resource by the Tennessee Art Commission and which attracted over 55,000 people to last season's performances.

It was founded in 1965 as a community theater, after Paul Crabtree—an actor/writer/composer/director/producer-moved from California to his wife's hometown of Crossville to write a book. In the meantime, he helped the school produce a lavish production of The Perils of Pinocchio, and the citizens were so enchanted they formed a corporation and sold stock in order to build the playhouse. A few years later, it became nonprofit and has grown into Tennessee's largest professional theater-but the County Playhouse has never forgotten the needs of the county's children.

Paul Crabtree died in 1979, but his wife, Mary, is still extremely active in its productions, and their oldest son, Jim, is the current producing director. Its Children's Creativity Center offers recreational drama and performing arts classes (there is a charge only for dance lessons), and the center, in association with the Tennessee Arts Commission and the Cumberland County School System, recently hired a Director of Education to develop and execute a drama curriculum in the public schools and to coordinate the center's programs with the playhouse's goals.

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