Tourists and Trade: Roadside Craftsmen and the Highway Transforming Craft

How two roadside craft shops in upstate New York transformed American crafts into a fine art.

Finalist for the 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Regional category

Amid the economic turmoil of the Great Depression, in 1929, Clarence Wemett, an upstate New York petroleum merchant, underwrote a craft shop bordering U.S. Route 20 and, a few years later, a different one 15 miles away. At precisely the wrong time for such things to happen, the improbable idea of selling discretion...