Appalachian Figures
On a farm called Strawberry Hill outside Grantsville, Maryland, a sickly girl once spent more time in the woods than in a classroom. She memorized wildflowers instead of spelling lists and pressed ferns into homemade notebooks. Decades later, that girl, Alta Elizabeth Schrock, would hold a doctorate in biology and preside over an Appalachian world of her own making: a restaurant in an old stagecoach inn, a log cabin artisan village, a packed folk festival, a local-history journal, and even a nature trail that bears her name.
In western Maryland and the Pennsylvania borderlands, you can still walk through places she imagined into being. Penn Alps Restaurant hums beside the old National Road. Spruce Forest Artisan Village gathers cabins under the spruce trees near the Casselman River. The Springs Folk Festival fills a Somerset County hillside with music, looms, and kettles of apple butter. Even the hiking path behind Penn Alps is labeled the Alta Schrock Nature Trail.
Together these projects tell the story of a Mennonite farm girl who became one of the most quietly influential public historians in the Alleghenies.
Strawberry Hill: A Botanist in the Making
Alta Elizabeth Schrock was born April 3, 1911, on Strawberry Hill Farm near Grantsville, Maryland, the oldest of eight children in a conservative Amish-Mennonite family.
Poor health kept her out of regular school for much of her childhood. Instead of a classroom, she had the woods. Later biographical sketches note that she learned her Bible, poems, and the names of plants while walking five miles to and from school once she was strong enough to attend.
Her father eventually built her a small study cabin so that she could work in peace on her collections and writing. That rough little building, moved years later to Spruce Forest as “Alta’s Cabin,” became a kind of shrine to her lifelong habit of pairing scholarship with place.
Schrock finished high school in nearby Salisbury, Pennsylvania, then studied biology at Waynesburg College. Graduate work followed at the University of Cincinnati and Kent State University. In 1944 she completed a Ph.D. in biology at the University of Pittsburgh, widely recognized as the first Mennonite woman in the United States to earn a doctorate.
Faculty listings in Frostburg State University catalogs later summarized her credentials in one crisp line: “ALTA E. SCHROCK, A.B. Waynesburg College; M.A. Kent State University; Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh.”
For a young woman raised in a plain-dress community, this was radical. Yet Schrock never described it as rebellion. In her own essays for the Casselman Chronicle she often framed learning as a kind of stewardship, a way to serve both church and countryside.
Professor Schrock: Biology for Service
After the doctorate, Schrock joined the biology faculty at American University in Washington, D.C., then moved to Goshen College in Indiana and finally to Frostburg State in western Maryland.
At Goshen she advised an Audubon Society chapter and led students on field trips, blending Mennonite concern for creation with careful scientific training.
Contemporary Mennonite essays on “biology for service” later singled her out as part of a small wave of Anabaptist scientists who treated environmental care as a Christian calling.
In the laboratory she specialized in botany and general biology. Outside the classroom she wrote nature essays for local papers and kept meticulous plant notebooks, some of which are still preserved in the archives of the Springs Historical Society.
Yet by the mid 1950s she felt a tug away from the traditional academic path. That inner pull became the hinge of her life.
“An Imperative Call” Back to the Alleghenies
In the late 1950s, while teaching in Indiana, Schrock later recalled feeling “an imperative call to return to her beloved Alleghenies to serve its people.”
Institutional histories of Spruce Forest and Penn Alps preserve her own explanation of that call. She wanted, in her words, “to provide a marketing arm for their cottage industries, a cultural center to showcase and preserve the area’s arts and crafts, its music, history, and spiritual values and to open a restaurant to serve hearty country fare.”
That phrase reads almost like a personal mission statement.
Her search for a place to carry it out led her back toward Grantsville and to an old National Road landmark called Little Crossings. The site offered everything she needed: an early nineteenth century log inn, a stone arch bridge over the Casselman River, and a gristmill close at hand.
Schrock envisioned not just a tourist stop, but a living rural economy grounded in traditional skills. From that vision came three institutions that still shape the region.
Penn Alps: “To Help People to Help Themselves”
Schrock’s first major project at Little Crossings was Penn Alps, a combination restaurant and craft shop housed in the old log stagecoach inn. On its own history page, Penn Alps still points back to its founder as both historian and organizer.
By the early 1960s, a New York Times feature described how the transplanted biology professor had turned the inn into what it called a “showplace for local artisans” and a steady source of income for hundreds of craftspeople in the tri-state area.
Penn Alps grew alongside a large handicraft shop where visitors could buy quilts, carvings, baskets, and other handmade items. The internal motto, often quoted in later biographies, captured the project’s purpose: “To help people to help themselves.”
According to Penn Alps records, checks from the craft shop became a “major means of support” for many rural families. For isolated or elderly artisans, the chance to sell their work through a trusted cooperative brought not only cash but “a new sense of dignity and worth.”
In an Associated Press profile from 1992, a reporter visiting Penn Alps described Schrock greeting diners beneath a large portrait of herself. When asked if she was the woman in the frame, she reportedly chuckled and replied that Penn Alps was not about her picture, but about the people whose handiwork filled the building.
Spruce Forest Artisan Village: Cabins Under the Spruce Trees
The second branch of Schrock’s dream grew just behind Penn Alps, where a cluster of old log buildings gradually formed Spruce Forest Artisan Village.
Spruce Forest histories remember that what began as a few relocated cabins eventually became a village of about a dozen eighteenth and nineteenth century structures, most adapted as studios for resident artisans.
Visitors can watch potters, weavers, woodcarvers, and metalworkers at their benches while hearing stories about the National Road and the farm families who first settled Little Crossings. The village also uses buildings like the Miller House and Compton School as small museums and storytelling spaces.
One cabin, simplest of all, carries the most personal meaning. This is Alta’s Cabin, the study house her father once built on Strawberry Hill so that his bookish daughter could pursue her science. Spruce Forest moved it to the village in 1970 and interprets it today as a window into her habits of writing and collecting.
A modern magazine feature on “rebuilding Alta’s vision” after a devastating 2020 windstorm described how board members and volunteers see themselves as stewards of that original calling. They quote her determination to stay “always two dreams ahead,” a phrase that seems to have circulated among her friends and students.
Springs and the Casselman Chronicle: History From the Ground Up
Schrock’s third major institution did not serve food or sell crafts. It printed stories.
In 1957 she returned across the state line to Pennsylvania and helped organize the Springs Historical Society in the village of Springs, Somerset County.
Under her guidance the society launched several interlocking projects: a local museum, a farmers’ market, the Springs Folk Festival, and a historical journal called the Casselman Chronicle.
The Chronicle became her main outlet for historical writing. Casselman subject and author indexes list her across decades as the writer of pieces like “Memories of Strawberry Hill,” “Memories of Casselman Church,” genealogical articles on Mennonite families, book reviews, and memorial essays.
These articles often blend first-person recollection with documentary research. In one essay she might describe a childhood walk to church through snow; in another she patiently tracks land deeds and family migrations. Taken together they reveal an Appalachian historian who believed that every farm lane and hillside graveyard deserved a place in the printed record.
Later issues of the Chronicle, written after her death, include a memorial exhibit at the Springs Museum and feature articles on her “love of nature,” the “initiation of the Casselman Chronicle,” and what editors call her “greatest accomplishment.”
The Springs Folk Festival: “A Homecoming” in the Hills
If Penn Alps and Spruce Forest brought visitors to Grantsville, the Springs Folk Festival lured them to a hillside in Somerset County.
Local newspapers trace the festival back to Schrock’s “homecoming” idea in the early 1960s. A 2002 article in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, quoting an earlier issue of the Casselman Chronicle, recalls Schrock imagining a gathering where people could return “back home” to see traditional crafts, hear old-time music, and share food “their forefathers would recognize.”
Today those same papers still describe the Springs Folk Festival as her “brainchild.” Annual coverage in the Daily American repeats the pattern: heritage demonstrations like log hewing and bread baking, quilts and woodcarving displays, hymns sung in German as well as English, and storytellers recalling early settlement days.
The festival also became a stage for Schrock herself. In a campus newspaper at Eastern Mennonite University, a reporter described a visit where she brought Allegheny folk art to display, using the occasion to speak about the spiritual and cultural values embedded in everyday objects.
In that sense, the festival operated as both museum and reunion, a place where academic history, local memory, and living practice met under canvas tents.
Nature Trails and Plant Notebooks
For all her work with restaurants and festivals, Schrock never left biology behind.
Penn Alps maintains a short footpath behind the complex called the Alta Schrock Nature Trail. The trail’s description explicitly honors her as both founder of the Springs Historical Society and a botanist, inviting visitors to walk “a short nature trail (4/10 mile, easy terrain)” and learn about local plants through a self-guided botany walk.
Casselman Chronicle indexes and a 2011 story in Mountain Discoveries magazine note that she kept plant specimen notebooks well into old age and that these field notes formed a quiet archive of Allegheny flora.
In later life she wrote reflective pieces such as “Mt. Davis trip” and “Memories of Strawberry Hill,” which read like a naturalist’s journal filtered through a memoirist’s eye.
Modern Mennonite historians of science treat her as a key example of how religious communities in Appalachia fostered environmental concern long before “ecology” became a buzzword.
“A Woman of Firsts”: Honors and Late Recognition
By the time she stepped back from daily work at Penn Alps and Springs in the 1980s and 1990s, Schrock had become what one regional magazine called “a woman of firsts.”
The Maryland State Archives remember her as a “lady with a strong creative spirit” who “restored self esteem and introduced a better way of life” in parts of Western Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia by coordinating craft cooperatives and cultural programs.
She was inducted into the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame in 1991 and the Garrett County Women’s Hall of Fame in the mid 1990s.
Obituaries in the Baltimore Sun and local Somerset County papers summarized her life in the language of both church and tourism: biology professor, Mennonite humanitarian, founder of Springs Historical Society, Penn Alps, Spruce Forest Artisan Village, and the Springs Folk Festival.
In 2007, Maryland Traditions, the state folklife program, created an Achievement in Living Traditions and Arts award named ALTA in her honor, recognizing individuals and groups who sustain Maryland’s cultural traditions.
She died in Cumberland, Maryland, on November 7, 2001, at the age of ninety.
Reading Alta in Her Own Words
Because so many of Schrock’s writings remain scattered in small journals and local newspapers, historians are only beginning to take full stock of her legacy.
Two recent essays in the Casselman Chronicle by poet and scholar Julia Spicher Kasdorf interpret her life as that of a “humanitarian, environmentalist, entrepreneur” who used both science and story to build institutions.
Kasdorf and others have argued that Schrock deserves a place in broader narratives of women’s history, public history, and Appalachian studies. An Anabaptist Historians blog post on “literary women” even treats Kasdorf’s ongoing project of writing about Schrock as a case study in how biography can bridge academic and community storytelling.
Yet perhaps the clearest way to meet her is still through her own prose. In the Casselman Chronicle and related genealogical works she wrote about Strawberry Hill, the Casselman Church, local Amish and Mennonite families, and early land holdings in the valley. Many of these essays rely on deeds, church records, and personal letters. At the same time, they retain the conversational tone of someone who knew the farms and family names by heart.
For researchers, these pieces are true primary sources. For neighbors in Garrett and Somerset counties, they are family stories set down in print.
Why Alta Schrock Matters to Appalachian History
Alta Schrock rarely appears in standard textbooks about Appalachia. Her work did not involve dramatic strikes, battlefield heroics, or courthouse showdowns. Instead she moved in church basements, craft shops, board meetings, and festival grounds.
Walk through Spruce Forest on a summer afternoon or listen to hymns drifting over the Springs Folk Festival grounds and you can still feel her reply. Heritage is not a relic to be stored behind glass. It is a lived practice, renewed each time someone fires a loom, retells a local legend, or leads a nature walk for the next generation of curious kids.
For a girl who once kept plant notebooks in a hilltop cabin, that might have been the most satisfying result of all.
Sources & Further Reading
Oral history interviews with Dr. Alta E. Schrock, National Park Service / Maryland Historical Trust, June 5 and November 16, 1970 (referenced in the Casselman Bridge National Register of Historic Places nomination).springspa.org
Casselman Chronicle author and subject index entries under “Schrock, Alta” and “Alta Schrock Nature Trail,” Springs Historical Society of the Casselman Valley.springspa.org+1
Schrock, Alta E., assorted essays and genealogies in the Casselman Chronicle and related volumes, including “Memories of Strawberry Hill,” “Memories of Casselman Church,” and studies of the Gnagey and Schrag/Schrock families.springspa.org+1
“Alta Schrock, founder of Penn Alps and Spruce Forest Artisan Village,” history panels and web narratives from Penn Alps and Spruce Forest Artisan Village, including the profile “In 1957 Alta Schrock… had an imperative call to return to her beloved Alleghenies.”pennalps.com+1
Obituary and memorial notices: “Alta E. Schrock, 90, artisan village founder,” Baltimore Sun; reprinted obituary on the Salisbury, Pennsylvania Historical web site.salisburypa.com+1
“Alta Schrock,” Western Maryland Regional Library (WHILBR) women’s history project.whilbr.org
“Alta Schrock, Ph.D.,” Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame, Maryland State Archives.Maryland State Archives
“Alta Schrock,” Music at Penn Alps biographical page.musicatpennalps.org
F. D. Baldwin, “Always Two Dreams Ahead,” Appalachia: Journal of the Appalachian Regional Commission 27, no. 4 (1994).Wikipedia
Julia Spicher Kasdorf, “Alta Elizabeth Schrock (1911–2001): Humanitarian, Environmentalist, Entrepreneur – Woman of Firsts” and “Alta Schrock, Botanist and Nature Study Writer,” Casselman Chronicle (2020, 2023).springspa.org+1
“Spruce Forest Artisan Village: Rebuilding Alta’s Vision,” Lakefront Magazine, 2021.Lake Front Magazine
“Alta Schrock,” Wikipedia entry (useful as a guide to additional newspaper and journal sources).Wikipedia