Our history
The Clara Muxen Story
& How Our Two-Story, Native Stone Building Came To Be …
By Rebecca Buchanan, Ozark Folkways executive director 2009-2017
The Journey That Started It All
Long years ago, the Muxen family traveled from Iowa through our Boston Mountains range on their way to Hot Springs, Arkansas.
Clara Muxen was a former school teacher and Catholic nun. She and her brother were taking their elderly and frail mother to Hot Springs. They wanted to see whether the famous mineral baths would help improve her health.
On the way, they arrived in Winslow, spending a night on top of Mount Gaylor, the ridge that carries Highway 71 from Northwest Arkansas to the Arkansas River Valley. The family stayed at Sky Vue Lodge, itself built in 1938 and survives today, across the highway from where our building is located.
It was here that Clara became entranced by the beautiful mountain scenery. And anyone seeing the sunrise or sunset in the Boston Mountains can easily understand Clara’s feelings. But that was only the beginning.
That night, she dreamed of opening a school for arts and crafts that could generate an income. Helen Keliher, a school teacher from Detroit, loved the idea. She contributed the first funds to build a craft school for boys and girls.
Setting the Foundation
The Muxens purchased acreage that was later known as Muxen Heights. Clara and her brother each had their own home on the property.
By the early 1940s, construction had begun next door to the shrine on what is now the home of Ozark Folkways.
Clara Muxen had started this as the Craft School of the Ozarks. We know this from her handwritten letterhead.
To support her endeavors, she started a gift shop in the old service station. She also maintained a used clothing distribution program for needy hill people.
Apparently, Miss Muxen hoped to train these hill folk, locked in poverty, to value their traditional crafts and make the most of them. We have her hand-drawn plans for the building with individual rooms labeled according to what she envisioned as their purpose.
Building A Community
One primary example of her endeavors bearing fruit is seen today in a woodcarving studio upstairs in the building.
There, Janet Denton Cordell teaches her techniques four or five times annually. Janet’s father sold his work to Miss Muxen early in his woodworking career. She coached him, encouraging him to sign his work and to put a finish on it that would bring out the beauty of the grain. You can read more about this woodcarving family in the National Geographic issue of June 1975.
Over the next three years, the exterior of what we would call the Muxen Building grew to its two-story height.
Clara was no stranger to hard work and did whatever was necessary to keep the construction going, even pouring cement.
They helped begin Catholic services in a converted service station on the property. Later, they gave a portion of this land to the Catholic Church, where a beautiful shrine was built. This shrine has an active parish and was also on the list of National Historic Shrine Pilgrimages last year.
Did Clara Live To Realize The Dream?
But her health failed, Clara Muxen gave the property to the order of nuns that cared for her in her last days. According to the limited information available, the building was used briefly as a nun’s retreat and parochial school. For whatever reason, the church did not finish what Clara had begun.
But Clara did not live to see the interior nor see it full of students as she had dreamed. She died of tuberculosis in 1966.
Ms. Cordell of the famous woodcarving family offers an optimistic claim. She says Ivan Denton, her father, taught one woodcarving class on behalf of Miss Muxen before she died in 1966.
Our building became an orphan then. It stood vacant for many years, until it was acquired in the early 70’s by a non-profit organization named The Ozark Native Craft Association.