Front facade of Taylor-Grady House showing Greek Revival columns, wrought iron railings, and stone steps in Athens Georgia

Athens, Georgia · National Historic Landmark

Where
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Four pillars of living heritage practice — Arts, Culture, Foodways, and Commune — Transforming our history into shared experiences that foster belonging.

Abstract painting in layered earth tones — reds, golds, and grays

Arts

The visible — what we make, what we create, what we leave behind to be seen.

LATE MAR Music in the Air

Arts

The visible — what we make, what we create, what we leave behind to be seen.

Traditional Pottery: Primitive Methods

5-Week Workshop

Wild clay gathering, hand-shaping without wheels, and open-fire kiln building — pottery the way it has always been done.

Heritage craftsmanship rooted in the oldest methods of working with earth. Under artist Pat Shields, participants gather wild clay from the land, shape by hand without a wheel, and build a community kiln fired on the grounds of Taylor-Grady House. Two cohorts run concurrently — adult evening sessions and youth morning sessions — covering the same progression from raw earth to finished piece.

Before pottery was art, it was survival. The methods taught here — gathering clay from the earth, shaping it by hand, firing it in the open — are among the oldest human technologies. They belong to no single culture because they belong to all of them.

Anchor Event Mid-July 2026 Pat Shields — When the Pottery Tells the Story

VIP reception and exhibition opening. Pat Shields presents on formation, firing, regional traditions, and the stories behind the glazes. Workshop registrants attend free. Exhibition open for one week following. $30.

What You’ll Take Home

Finished pottery pieces shaped and fired by your own hands. Wild clay gathering and primitive hand-building techniques. The experience of building and firing a community kiln.

What to Bring

Clothes suitable for outdoor clay work and closed-toe shoes.

All materials and firing included. Full supply list provided with registration confirmation.

July 2026, five consecutive weeks. Adult cohort: Tuesdays 6–9 PM, $350. Youth ages 8–15: Wednesdays 9 AM–12 PM, $50. All materials and firing included.

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Living Craft Collective

Year-Round

Apprenticeships, workshops, residencies, and a Heritage Craft Market — preserving craft traditions through active practice.

A year-round program sustaining heritage craft traditions through apprenticeships, monthly workshops, artist residencies, and an annual Heritage Craft Market. Woodworking, weaving, metalwork, ceramics — not preservation behind glass but active practice, maker-to-maker knowledge transfer.

The crafts practiced here were survival skills of enslaved people, homesteaders, and working families. The Living Craft Collective keeps them alive not as nostalgia but as enduring knowledge.

Anchor Event Mid-October 2026 Fall Festival & Heritage Craft Market

All-day artisanal fair on the Taylor-Grady House grounds. Artisan booths, live demonstrations, open-fire cooking, and live music. $10 admission.

What You’ll Take Home

Hands-on heritage craft skills through workshops and apprenticeships. Connections within a network of working artisans. Understanding of craft traditions as living, transferable knowledge.

What to Bring

Varies by workshop.

Full supply list provided with registration confirmation.

Phased launch through 2026. Monthly workshops begin May. Apprenticeships (6–12 weeks) begin August. Artist residencies (3 months) begin October. Heritage Craft Market: October.

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Listening Sessions

Monthly

Hear the song. Then hear the story. Intimate live music where artists share the personal histories behind the music.

Monthly live music gatherings — indoors in the cooler months, on the porch when the weather warms. Each session features an artist who plays, then speaks — sharing the personal history, the place, and the people behind the songs. Not a concert. An act of listening.

Music holds memory differently than words. A song carries the place where it was written, the person who taught it, the grief or joy that made it necessary. Listening Sessions give artists the space to share not just sound but story.

Anchor Event Late March 2026 Music in the Air

Gospel, Blues, and Jazz Showcase — three short sets demonstrating the “story behind the song” format. Launches the monthly Listening Sessions series. $25.

What You’ll Take Home

An intimate encounter with live music and the stories behind it — the places, people, and memories that made each song necessary.

Third Friday, 7:00–9:30 PM. $35 general, $50 premium. Scholarship seats available. Special edition: Longest Night (December solstice).

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Art in the Classroom

Annual

Free printmaking workshops for children ages 6–11, honoring the legacies of Lamar Dodd and Jaffy Rowland.

An annual free arts education program bringing children ages 6–11 to Taylor-Grady House for hands-on printmaking — block printing, nature printing, and monoprints using the house and grounds as inspiration. Named for UGA art pioneer Lamar Dodd and beloved Chase Street Elementary teacher Jaffy Rowland.

Art in the Classroom exists because access to art-making should never depend on a family’s ability to pay. When a child carves a block, inks it, and presses it onto paper, they discover they can make something permanent from their own imagination.

What You’ll Take Home

Hands-on printmaking skills — block printing, nature printing, and monoprints. Finished prints to take home.

Fall 2026. Single session, two hours. Free — funded by sponsorship and institutional grants.

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Cultural heritage practice — traditional regalia at an outdoor gathering

Culture

The personhood — who we are, where we come from, how we know ourselves.

EARLY APR Sankofa Opening Reception

Culture

The personhood — who we are, where we come from, how we know ourselves.

Story Circle

Monthly

Your story matters. Someone should hear it. A monthly gathering for personal storytelling around themed prompts.

Monthly community storytelling gatherings around themed prompts — Food Memories, Place, Work, Crossings, Names, Seasons. Not performance but participation. Anyone who arrives has a story worth telling.

Before archives, before recording, before writing — someone spoke and someone listened. Story Circle returns to that original act. It says: your story matters, and someone should hear it.

Anchor Event Early December 2026 Winter Open House

Holiday gathering with storytelling stations, a featured storyteller performance, seasonal refreshments, and live acoustic music. Story Circle format introduced to the community.

What You’ll Take Home

The experience of telling your own story and being heard. Connection with neighbors through shared themes.

Second Thursday, 6:30–8:00 PM. Free, donation suggested. Special editions: Longest Night (December), Intergenerational (September, November).

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Sankofa: Tracing Lineage

Exhibition + Workshop

Art opens the door. Genealogy walks through it. A hybrid exhibition, panel, and genealogy workshop exploring ancestry.

A two-week cultural event anchored by an exhibition of Tunde Odunlade’s West African textile art, an “Art, Archives, Ancestry” panel, and a hands-on genealogy workshop intensive. Encounter art that insists on heritage, then turn inward to trace your own lineage through records, oral history, and DNA.

Sankofa — the Akan concept of reaching back to move forward. Your ancestry is not a closed book. It is a living document, and you are still writing it.

Anchor Event Early April 2026 Sankofa Opening Reception

Docent-guided exhibition opening featuring Tunde Odunlade’s West African textile art. Genealogy preview station with sample deed research. $25 general, $125 VIP, $10 student.

What You’ll Take Home

Practical genealogy skills — deed research, oral history techniques, DNA interpretation. A deeper understanding of your own ancestry as a living document.

What to Bring

Any family documents, photographs, or oral history notes you have. Genealogy materials and research tools provided.

April 2026, two weeks. Opening reception: $25 general, $125 VIP, $10 student. Panel: free. Genealogy workshops: two Saturdays, $50 per day.

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The Long Conversation

12-Week Program

An intergenerational oral history program where younger community members learn to listen, record, and preserve the stories of elders.

A 12-week program pairing younger community members with elders for guided conversation. Participants learn interview techniques, archival practice, and deep listening — culminating in a recorded capstone interview that joins the Taylor-Grady House oral history archive.

The Long Conversation exists because someone said: I wish I could go back and talk to my grandmother. This program creates the conditions for conversations that might otherwise never happen.

Anchor Event Late May 2026 (Spring) · Late November 2026 (Fall) The Gathering

Oral history capstone celebration. Participants share excerpts from recorded interviews with elders. A celebration honoring the elders who shared their stories.

What You’ll Take Home

Interview and deep listening skills. Archival practice fundamentals. A recorded capstone interview that joins the TGH oral history archive.

What to Bring

Notebook and pen. Recording equipment provided.

Two cohorts per year — Spring (March–May), Fall (September–November). Weekly two-hour sessions. $50 tuition.

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Historic kitchen interior with brick hearth, cast iron cookware, and period tools at Taylor-Grady House, Athens Georgia

Foodways

The sustenance — how we nourish ourselves, gather, and share.

MID-MAR Garden Party

Foodways

The sustenance — how we nourish ourselves, gather, and share.

Small Space, Big Harvest

5-Session Workshop

Grow where you are. Keep what matters. Container gardening for apartment dwellers, renters, and anyone with more ambition than acreage.

Five sessions teaching container gardening for people without traditional garden space — apartment balconies, patios, windowsills. Progresses from soil science to harvest planning, with a permanent demonstration garden on the Taylor-Grady House grounds and community outreach extending to sites across Athens.

Ninety-seven percent of Georgia’s heritage seeds are gone. This program starts with a container on a balcony and ends with a community reclaiming what it grows, saves, and shares.

Anchor Event Mid-March 2026 Garden Party

Container garden showcase and program launch. Rotating demonstrations, garden partner tables, and take-home starter kits for the first 30 registrants. Free admission.

What You’ll Take Home

Container gardening skills for any living space. A take-home starter kit (first 30 registrants). Harvest planning knowledge from soil science to seed saving.

What to Bring

One container or pot (any size). Gardening gloves recommended.

Full supply list provided with registration confirmation.

March–August 2026, five sessions. $75 full series, $20 single session.

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Heritage Hearth: Iron Over Flame

Seasonal Series

Cast iron cooking over live fire — not reenactment, not novelty. A return to the elemental act of feeding people.

Year-round seasonal cooking workshops over live fire. Cast iron and open flame. Lee Epting as permanent storyteller, with rotating local chef-instructors guiding each session. Every workshop ends with a communal meal — spanning Dutch oven, skillet cornbread, fish on coals, and traditions from Appalachian, enslaved African, and Gullah-Geechee foodways.

Every cultural thread in Heritage Hearth carries a lineage: Dutch ovens from Appalachian trail cooking, skillet cornbread from enslaved cooks, fish on coals from Gullah-Geechee tradition. This is not reenactment — it is a return to the elemental.

Anchor Event Mid-October 2026 Fall Festival

All-day artisanal fair featuring open-fire cooking demonstrations, artisan craft booths, and live music. $10 admission.

What You’ll Take Home

Cast iron and live-fire cooking skills across cultural traditions. A communal meal shared with fellow participants at every session.

Year-round, Saturdays 4:00–7:30 PM. $75 per session. All cooking equipment and ingredients provided.

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Heritage Food Trails

Seasonal

Gathering is not grocery shopping. It is pilgrimage. Full-day journeys tracing food from seed to farm to fire to table.

Seasonal full-day journeys following food from source to table. Each trail visits working farms and producers — Red Mule Grits, Jaemor Farms, Old Country Store — returns to Taylor-Grady House for Heritage Hearth cooking, and closes with the Set Table: a communal meal where every ingredient was gathered that day.

Seed to plate to neighbor. The whole Foodways portfolio is one system. Heritage Food Trails makes that system visible in a single day.

Anchor Event Late September 2026 Harvest Table

Seasonal farm-to-table communal dinner. Ingredients gathered from partner farms, prepared over live fire, served at the Set Table. Preservation station with a take-home jar. $65.

What You’ll Take Home

A full-day journey from farm to fire to table. First-hand knowledge of local food sources and heritage producers. A communal Set Table meal made entirely from that day’s gathered ingredients.

What to Bring

Comfortable walking shoes and weather-appropriate clothing.

All food, transport, and cooking included. Full details provided with registration confirmation.

Four seasonal trails per year, Thursday–Saturday. $150 per person. Includes transport, farm visits, cooking session, and communal meal.

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Food Jar: Pickling

3-Session Workshop

Quick pickles, fermented pickles, kimchi — three sessions that preserve not just food but the memory of how families once got by.

A three-session intensive in the art and science of pickling. Sessions progress from quick refrigerator pickles to lacto-fermented preserves to kimchi. Preservation as heritage practice — the reason families pickled was not flavor but survival, and that knowledge is disappearing.

Food Jar exists to preserve the memory of how families once got by. Pickling is the entry point — the simplest, most forgiving preservation method — but what we’re really preserving is the knowledge itself.

Anchor Event Late September 2026 Harvest Table

Seasonal farm-to-table dinner previewing the Food Jar preservation workshops. Guests take home a jar of seasonal pickles. $65.

What You’ll Take Home

Practical pickling skills — quick pickles, lacto-fermentation, and kimchi. Jars of preserved food from each session.

What to Bring

Apron recommended. All canning jars, ingredients, and equipment provided.

July 2026, three consecutive Saturdays, 10 AM–1 PM. $95 package (all three sessions required).

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Food Jar: Preservation Series

Multi-Level Series

A progressive series in food preservation — pickling, canning, smoking, and curing — building skills from fundamentals to advanced technique.

Four levels of heritage food preservation, each building on the last. Pickling teaches the fundamentals — salt, acid, fermentation. Canning builds structure — water-bath methods, seal integrity, shelf stability. Smoking introduces fire and time. Curing completes the progression with salt-cured meats and fish using techniques that predate refrigeration by centuries. Together, the four levels form a complete preservation practice.

The knowledge of how to keep food — how to make summer last through winter, how to turn abundance into security — was once ordinary. Every household knew it. Within two generations, most of that knowledge disappeared. The Preservation Series recovers it, one level at a time.

What You’ll Take Home

Progressive preservation skills from pickling through curing. Preserved food from each session. The practical knowledge to stock a pantry using heritage methods.

What to Bring

Apron recommended. All equipment, jars, and ingredients provided.

Schedule forthcoming. Four progressive levels, each building on the previous.

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Community gathering — people seated together in an intimate setting

Commune

Belonging in practice — neighbors gathering, caring for one another, and sustaining community together.

EARLY SEP Neighbor Day

Commune

Commune is where belonging becomes lived experience. It begins with simple presence — time on the porch, shared conversation — and grows into neighbors who know one another well enough to show up when it counts. What starts here continues beyond this house.

Community does not sustain itself by accident. It is formed when people know one another well enough to show up — in ordinary weeks and in difficult seasons. Commune exists to make that kind of belonging possible.

Belonging Formation

Porch Time

Weekly Belonging

Welcome home. This house is your house. An open-door gathering with no agenda and no registration — just presence.

Weekly open-door community gathering. No agenda, no registration, no programming. Iced tea, lemonade, coffee. Neighbors sit, talk, or rest. The house is open for informal tours.

Porch Time is the simplest expression of the Taylor-Grady House mission: the house is open, you are welcome, and no one will ask you to buy, register, or perform anything. Community sustained without transaction. Familiarity built here — week after week, face to face — is what makes everything else in Commune possible.

Wednesdays, 12:00–3:00 PM, February–December. Free. No registration required.

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Belonging in Difficult Seasons

Neighbor to Neighbor (N2N)

Training Program Resilience

Because someone should notice. Emergency preparedness training and neighborhood response teams for a community that looks after its own.

Community emergency preparedness and neighborhood response training. Two tracks: individual emergency skills and neighborhood team formation. Quarterly Safety Saturdays bring the program to the public. The Neighbor Network builds buddy systems, check-in protocols, and block-level care across Athens.

Neighbor to Neighbor exists because someone should notice — when the power goes out, when the elderly neighbor hasn’t been seen, when the street floods. Neighbors looking out for neighbors is the oldest work there is. Preparedness practiced together means no one is unseen during difficult seasons.

Anchor Event Early September 2026 Neighbor Day

Community preparedness fair during National Preparedness Month. Partner booths, hands-on demonstrations, neighborhood mapping, and sign-ups. Free admission.

What You’ll Take Home

Emergency preparedness skills. Neighborhood response team formation. A buddy system and check-in network for your block.

What to Bring

Notebook and comfortable clothing for hands-on drills. All training materials provided.

Fall 2026 launch. $75 per participant. Quarterly Safety Saturdays: free.

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Shared Services Hub

Ongoing Membership Capacity

Technical and operational support for early-stage nonprofits — because community organizations shouldn’t have to build capacity alone.

A shared services platform providing workspace, equipment, tools, and peer support for early-stage nonprofits. Tiered membership from free access to full services. Quarterly Mingles with guest speakers create cross-pollination among member organizations.

Every nonprofit that thrives because of shared services extends the Taylor-Grady House heritage mission beyond its own walls — building the capacity of organizations that serve the same community. Shared support strengthens the organizations that neighbors already rely on.

Anchor Event Early December 2026 Winter Open House

Holiday gathering previewing the Shared Services Hub for nonprofit partners. Information tables, year-in-review display, and seasonal celebration.

What You’ll Take Home

Access to shared workspace, equipment, and professional tools. A peer network of early-stage nonprofits. Quarterly professional development and cross-pollination.

May 2026 soft launch. Tiered membership: Startup ($0–25/month), Emerging ($50–75/month), Established ($100–150/month). Quarterly Mingles included.

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Where Connected Community Lives

Where
Connected
Community
Lives