Published: May 09, 2008 12:30 pm         

A Spinner of Yarns: A profile of Granny Toothman

Lyndall “Granny” Toothman was born on May 1, 1910 in a log cabin in the mountains of Greenbrier County, West Virginia.

She grew up poor, learning to support herself on the land around her and her resourcefulness. She was not a spinner and weaver by nature. As a girl she spent most of her time shadowing her father, who trekked the woods as a lumber grader.

“God knows she was a survivor. She credits her father with teaching her so much about nature. She didn’t grow up spinning, so it wasn’t something that was natural to her. Her mother was a weaver, though, and the fiber arts were all around her. She was a great Tomboy and stayed out with her father and didn’t want to do that stuff,” Ellie Reser, who Granny taught to spin at MSU, says.

Granny graduated from high school in 1930 and became involved in the fiber arts, more by chance than through planning.

“In the 1940s, after the Depression, Roosevelt made a WPA program that took poor people from the mountains and taught them the forgotten skills that had been there before. That’s where Granny Toothman really learned to spin and weave,” Tomye Jo Chaney, who Granny taught to spin and quickly befriended, says.

According to an interview with Granny that appeared in the 10th edition of the Foxfire anthology, Granny said that she “went to one of the WPA classes in weaving, and then I taught at a state school in weaving afterwards. I reckon that changed my life; It was a turning point.”

In 1939, when Granny was 29 years old and her daughter, Jean, had just turned six, she found work as one of the youngest correctional officers at the first women’s penitentiary in the country, Aldersons Womens Reformatory in West Virginia.

She stayed there for nearly 13 years, and taught such infamous convicts as Squeaky Fromme, one of Charles Mansons girls who attempted to assassinate President Ford, and Axis Sally, a Nazi war criminal.

When her time at Aldersons had ended, she decided to hit the open road. She traveled the country, working at amusement parks such as Knotts Berry Farm, in California, Old Tucson, in Arizon, and Cedar Point, on Lake Huron. She also taught and did demonstrations at festivals and educational facilities.

One of the places that she most liked to visit in her travels was a little town called Morehead, Kentucky. She attended the Appalachian Celebration festival there, and came to like the town very well.

According to a November 28, 1985 Morehead State University press release, Toothman said, “Tom Sternal (chair of MSU’s Department of Art) asked me if I knew how to put together an old loom he had lying in a room at the school. One thing led to another, and now I’m working at the gallery all of the time.”

Toothman came to be employed by the university through the Green Thumb Program. Linda Thompson, who came to admire Toothman, remembers this time very well.

“I assigned Granny Toothman to MSU to be an artist in residence. I was working for a program based on Title 5 of the Old Americans Act, which was established to help retired farmers who hadn’t yet paid into Social Security. She did weaving and assisted with the fiber crafts program on-campus. So that’s how she ended up in this part of the country. She worked at MSU until 1992, when she requested to be transferred to an art gallery in Ashland, where her daughter lived. She wove and did demonstrations there until she got sick,” Thompson says.

While in Morehead, Toothman taught many to spin and weave. Among them was Ellie Reser, formerly of Morehead. The Two became very close.

“She was just a character. My friend Jean Jones and I went down to MSU to learn to spin. She said that she would try to teach us, but that some people can do it and some can’t, but she’d let us try. At the end of our lessons she told us that she had one good spinner and one good talker, and she’d let us decide which was which,” Reser, who was the good talker, says.

Granny not only taught others to spin, but also challenged herself to spin more and more difficult fibers. She had boards displaying all of the various fibers she had successfully spun, one of which is now on display at the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum in Tennessee, and one in their museum overseas, in England.

Many of her friends remember the unusual fibers she would spin.

“People would come up during demonstrations and would challenge her to spin different fibers. One guy came up to her once and challenged her to spin his beard. She did it!” Jean Jones, who was the good spinner, says.

Among the strange fibers that Granny utilized were over a hundred types of dog hair, which she was quite fond of, the fuzz off the belly of a baby penguin, horse mane and camel fur. Sherry Adkins, of Morehead, was especially impressed with Toothman’s boards.

“I’ll never forget as long as I live the display board that she had made. She had pictures of the animal sources, and examples of the yarn she’d made form them. There were various dogs, cats and goats, but I remember there was the hair off a whale’s tongue, and she had spun it and knitted a swatch,” Adkins, a member of the Montgomery County Appalachian Fiber Guild where Granny sometimes gave demonstrations, says.

Another member of the guild, Susan Hedgecock, of Owingsville, remembers these demonstrations all too well.

“Granny Toothman was feisty. She came to our Guild once and I admired her pocket book and looked at it and asked her how she made it. She s aid it was made of her daughter’s s hair. I jumped back and dropped it. She could spin anything,” Hedgecock says.

In 1992, just before she left MSU, she was awarded the fifth Appalachian Treasure Award at the opening of the university’s 16th annual Appalachian Celebration, an honor given to recognize an individual, according to the June 16, 1992 MSU Press Release, “with unusual talents and dedication in promoting and preserving Appalachian culture.”

Granny died on July 13, 2002 of natural causes. She was 92 years old. Though she is no longer of this world, she is warmly remembered by the friends she left behind, and will continue to be an influence on Kentucky fiber arts through the work of the many people who she taught to spin and weave.