At the turn of the last century, before the advent of modern pharmaceuticals, an essential aspect of women’s work was maintaining a kitchen cupboard well-stocked with herbs used both as nutritional supplements and medical treatments. Dawn Baldwin Barrett keeps these old folkways alive at Brightside Acres—her northern Pocahontas County mountaintop farm—where she handcrafts her trademarked Wildgrown Herbal Teas from more than two-dozen wild and cultivated plants. Dawn’s teas are beautifully packaged in recycled aluminum tins and environmentally friendly jute and woven organza pouches.
Dawn’s gourmet fruit preparations provide cooks and connoisseurs a unique taste of nature. Her essences, jams, and purees are handcrafted from an ever-changing variety of Wildgrown fruits, including apple, autumberry, barberry, blueberry, blackberry, cherry, elderberry, grape, hawthorn, peach, pear, plum, rose, serviceberry and staghorn sumac.
Discover more at Brightside Acres.
Jane's maple syrup has been a family tradition for several generations every spring to make maple syrup the old-fashioned way, boiling the water down to syrup with a wood-fired evaporator (furnace). For more info on Jane, please see her bio on this page).
Contact Sandy at lssimmons@hotmail.com
In 2016, Anne began crafting and selling locally sourced jellies and jams. These included a line of flower jellies harvested from nature.