North House Folk School

Providing hands-on connection in a fragmented world, North House Folk School leads the national folk school movement.

Nearly three decades ago, a green-hulled schooner hanging colorful canvas sailed into the harbor of Grand Marais, Minnesota, and moored at the wooden dock of the newly founded North House Folk School. The boat was, onlookers soon learned, for sale. “Come on,” recounted Greg Wright, North House’s executive director, “what school on the edge of Lake Superior wouldn’t want a floating classroom?” Three of the school’s founders went to the bank and took out personal loans to buy the schooner. Years later, refitted with a clean-running electric motor and flying wine-colored sails, the Hjordis is a crowning presence in the Grand Marais harbor, as fitting as a loon in front of a Boundary Waters campsite.

“When you come to Grand Marais,” Wright said, “the first thing you do in town is buy a cup of coffee or a piece of fudge; you sit on the shore and look at the harbor and lighthouse; you can’t see the schooner. She’s been a critical ambassador for the school and community.” Last year, 2,200 visitors sailed on the Hjordis during dozens of outings for sunrises and sunsets and everything in between. North House will turn thirty next year and has come far since its founding. When the school printed its first course catalog in 1997, it didn’t yet have a physical location and listed class locations as “to be determined.” Today, operating from a growing campus on the south side of Grand Marais, North House has grown to include nine buildings that include a wide variety of learning spaces, ranging from a commercial kitchen to an industrial garage to a spacious woodshop that smells of pine.

Greg Wright was the school’s first full-time employee when he joined in 2001. “The founders created a place to teach,” Wright said. “North House was created by people who loved the North, loved to work with their hands, and thought, ‘Hey, there are stories here that are part of the people who call this place home. There are cultural traditions that matter and are beautiful and inspiring.’ The only problem with starting a school is that eventually you have to run it. None of them wanted that job. For better or worse, they found me.” North House currently has 21 year-round staff and has been adding a position a year for the last decade.

In early 2026, visiting instructors began staying in a newly remodeled building across Highway 61 from the main campus, which is clustered along the harbor. One hundred seventy instructors, many local though others from around the globe, teach 400 different courses a year. The green building, where the out-of-towners stay, is clad in one of the school’s three solar panel arrays that provide nearly twenty percent of campus energy needs, including charging the Hjordis’ motor. The green building also houses the school’s interns. In 2025, fifty-one applicants vied for North House’s five intern slots. Interns spend ten months enmeshed with the school, learning crafts, teaching them, and otherwise supporting North House operations.

North House classes run the gamut and hinge on the global north. At the school you can build a yurt or a broom, weave a birchbark basket or forge-weld a throwing axe. You can make a variety of boats, including a Norse wooden skiff, a cedar-strip canoe, or a miniature coracle, measuring just three-and-a-half by four-and-a-half feet and made of nylon skin on a willow frame. Grand Portage artist Marcie McIntire teaches Anishinaabe-style beaded moccasins. Elise Kyllo and Heidi Quist teach a class called Wool: The Full Experience, in which, for eight hours a day for three days, students progress from shearing sheep to making wool to knitting or weaving that wool into something usable. Fiber arts include rug hooking, tapestry weaving, the sugar coat sweater, and Swedish hair bracelets.

“Our mission is to enrich lives and build community through the teaching of traditional northern craft,” Wright said. “Craft is the medium, not the mission. What do people say about the world today? We’re more connected than we’ve ever been, but more disconnected than we’ve ever been, from both ourselves and landscapes.” Folk schools use craft to, Wright said, “help us remember what it is to be human, that these hands of ours are pretty incredible.” Folk schools date back to 1850s Denmark, when a philosopher and pastor advocated for noncompetitive, community-based adult education. One of the North House founders, Mark Hansen, grew up with a grandfather who was into this philosophy, and Hansen later saw and admired folk schools in Norway. With a small group in 1997, he incorporated the noncompetitive, community-building ideals into the founding of North House. When North House opened, it was only the seventh folk school in the United States. Now there are seventy-five such schools in the country. Wright says the Midwest is a hotbed for folk schools, with new organizations in Duluth, Minneapolis, Marine on St. Croix, and in the Porcupine Mountains of Michigan.

The growing North House Folk School campus on the Grand Marais Harbor.

PHOTO CREDIT EITHER HJORDIS

On a summer day in Grand Marais, black silhouettes of tourists line the lighthouse breakwater and Lake Superior runs with two-foot waves. On the horizon, the Hjordis’ sails slice the seam between sky and sea like an arrowhead. Wright begins a tour with the school’s two original buildings, constructed in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps and used by the U.S. Forest Service.

North House serves 4,000 students annually, seventy percent of whom come from Minnesota. Of the remaining thirty percent of students, however, in a typical year they come from forty-five states. “You want to learn how to tan a moose hide?” Wright muses. “Where are you going to learn how to do that? How do you process sinew? Use spruce root? How do you harvest it without killing the trees? Where did we use to get everything we needed as a species? Out on the land. If you couldn’t get it, hopefully you didn’t need it. How do we rekindle those skills? They matter.” In addition to hosting several communitywide events each year, North House partners with the local school district. Every student in the county visits the school three times a year for programming. “All kids should learn how to make a knife,” Wright says. As to the school’s impact on its community, a 2007 economic impact study found North House brought in three million dollars annually to the area. When the study was done again in 2017, its most recent occurrence, the school’s contributions had grown to more than ten million dollars, and the school has grown significantly since then.

Wright doesn’t dwell on the economics, though, concluding, “In a small town it is pretty satisfying to work with your neighbors literally—some offering classes, others providing beds and meals—taking care of people who are curious about the North and want to be part of the vitality of an inspiring rural community. In a world that’s more defined and consumed by technology, everything is high tech, low touch. You don’t even have to see the face of the person making your coffee at that coffee shop. We’re the antithesis of high-touch, low-tech—kind of like knowing your local farmer. It’s pretty cool eating your oatmeal with a spoon you carved with your own hands. It’s pretty cool knowing how to make a wooden bowl that sits in the center of your family table. It’s incredible to build a wood-fired oven and literally nourish the community you care so much about. There’s nothing wrong with convenience, but just because it’s fast doesn’t mean it’s better. The school is not about retreating. We’re not about the past. We’re about connecting the past and present and future and shaping a beautiful and meaningful world.”