Where Traditions Live: Inside Fairmont State’s Folklife Center

Long before the Frank and Jane Gabor West Virginia Folklife Center became a hub of scholarship and cultural preservation, the Kennedy Dairy Barn was simply part of the landscape of Fairmont. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2006 and repurposed shortly after, it now houses the culture of West Virginia and the people intent on preserving it – part cultural gallery, part archive, part classroom. 

That’s precisely the point. 

“It’s a distinct reminder of who we are,” says Dr. Lydia Warren, the center’s director. “A display of the inclusivity of Fairmont State University.”

Since joining the university in 2022, Warren has led the Folklife Center through a period of significant growth, expanding programming, securing grant funding and building the kind of community that, as she puts it, doesn’t leave even after people do.

The Folklife Center is, by any measure, unusual in American higher education. It houses undergraduate minors in both folklore and museum studies, credentials that virtually nowhere else in the country offers at that level.

“At most schools, that’s a master’s degree,” Warren says. “Students come here and they’re able to get experience not just taking those classes, not just having those minors on their CV – but doing oral histories, creating exhibitions, going through the archives.”

Those aren’t abstract skills. Student workers have spent recent semesters fully inventorying all 117 boxes of the Ruth Ann Musick folklore collection, one of the center’s signature holdings. As undergraduates, they’re doing work that most archivists don’t attempt until graduate school.

“Usually, you need a master’s degree in archives to be allowed to touch the boxes,” Warren says. “And they’re in there with their gloves on as sophomores.”

For Marion County residents with no connection to the university, the Folklife Center has become something rarer still: a free, all-ages gathering place where cultural heritage isn’t behind glass.

Monthly acoustic music jams draw a rotating cast of musicians, some who’ve been coming for years, into an intimate circle open to listeners and players alike. Storytelling performances, craft workshops, square dances and literary arts events fill out a calendar that runs through the academic year and into summer.

This summer, the West Virginia Storytelling Guild brought its youth summer camp to campus, with children staying on-site and spending time at the center. The program is led by Dr. Fran Kirk, a former Folklife Center director and retired Fairmont State professor. Kirk’s continued involvement is emblematic of something Warren has observed again and again since taking the helm.

“The people who are interested in folk life cultivate a really strong sense of community,” Warren says. “Once you’re a part of this, you don’t leave – even when you leave.”

That continuity is part of what makes the center’s work possible. Former directors stay involved. Donors return. Families bring children for field trips to the same building where they once took classes.

Warren, an ethnomusicologist by training, describes cultural preservation not as nostalgia but as orientation, a way of helping people understand where they are and who got them there.

The center’s gallery walls trace the immigrant communities that built this region: Irish and Italian miners, timber workers, brickmakers. One of Fairmont’s more distinctive contributions to the built environment, the brick that appears on homes and buildings across town, was manufactured here, by hand, a little more than a century ago.

“It’s easy to forget that this wasn’t happening that long ago,” Warren says. “Everything around us was built by people who made things with their hands.”

But the Folklife Center is not a history museum, and Warren is quick to make the distinction. “The programming here is what we try to be,” she says. “This is where we’re going. These are traditions that are alive and still being practiced.”

That philosophy shows up in the center’s current exhibitions, which include a loan from the Arthurdale Heritage organization featuring handwoven functional textiles alongside works by contemporary fiber artists from across West Virginia – the same traditions expressed through new hands.

One of the center’s most significant projects in the coming year is the transition to a fully cloud-based archive system, a change that will make the center’s tens of thousands of holdings searchable by anyone, anywhere – for the first time.

“If you want to type in ‘fiber arts’ or ‘quilt’ or ‘Italian,’ you can see what we have,” Warren says. The system will be online and accessible before the end of 2026, with the full cataloging effort, a years-long undertaking, already underway.

That work depends directly on student workers funded through donor investment. Without donor support, Warren says, summer staffing simply isn’t possible.

“The archive work would be a lot slower,” she says. “The students working with us have been able to fully inventory 117 boxes of the Musick collection. There are concrete goals being checked off the list – thanks in large part to donors.”

The Folklife Center’s archive transition is just one piece of a larger momentum Warren describes. Donor dollars also cover the unglamorous but essential infrastructure of archival work: acid-free boxes, acid-free folders, nitrile and cotton gloves – the materials that make preservation possible.

It all reflects Warren’s broader vision for the center: a place where giving is acknowledged, traditions are practiced and anyone who walks through the door, whether they’ve been coming for decades or just moved to town, can find something that feels like home.

“If you just came to Marion County, if you just came to this country, you have your own traditions,” she says. “And they can be here, too.”

Give to the Folklife Center