The man camping next to us on our first visit to Grand Marais was there for one reason: to build a Greenland kayak by hand. His Massachusetts license plates and vintage Volkswagen Vanagon stood out in the municipal campground, but what struck us was his invitation: Come see the boat tomorrow. We did—and found ourselves in a light-filled workshop scented by wood shavings and varnish, watching artisans methodically hand-sew stretched fabric around wooden ribs. This was our introduction to the North House Folk School, a microvillage where traditional crafts are alive and urgent.
Courtesy of North House Folk School
Our interest piqued, we explored the campus, wandering into other colorful wooden buildings set around a courtyard on the shore of Lake Superior. A pot of good coffee and an honor jar to leave a buck kept me longer where students were learning the centuries-old craft of cordwaining (shoemaking). In a boathouse, students were setting bricks into place for the wood-fired oven they were building. As a lifelong baker, that discovery led me to scoop up the last spot in a two-hour wood-oven baking class, after which my family devoured my olive-oil drenched, pillowy focaccia around our campfire.
Photo by Megan Padilla
If this is life in Minnesota, we chose well. It was June 2019, and we had just signed papers on a Minneapolis house and detoured to Grand Marais before returning to Florida to pack up and move. A friend had pointed us to the North Shore, saying we needed to see the treasure in our new backyard—Lake Superior.
Founded in 1997 on the Grand Marais harbor, North House Folk School is best known for teaching traditional northern crafts through some 350 classes annually. But its greater draw is as a community hearth on the shore of Lake Superior. Even if you never step into a class, there are plenty of open invitations to be a part of it all. Across more than a dozen trips to Grand Marais, we always gravitate to the School Store to see what’s happening on the campus while we’re there. The welcome is as warm for passersby as it is for students enrolled in classes.
Message in a Bottle: Sailing on Hjørdis
Hjørdis, North House’s 50-foot schooner named after a Norse goddess of war, serves as the school’s floating classroom on Lake Superior. From shore, we’d often watch Hjørdis—her maroon sails flashing against a piercing blue sky or emerging ghostlike from a wall of fog. Always just out of reach, until the day my daughter, Ailigh, and I booked a sailing. My husband stayed on land with our dog.
When we finally cast off, the lake was glassy, the air warm, the wind nonexistent. The captain switched to the engine, but it didn’t matter. We were on the water at last. I was awed to see the depth finder register 400-plus feet not far offshore. Coming from Florida, we’re used to watching for dolphins. Instead, we saw a bottle with a paper inside. Intrigued, the crew netted it and handed it over to Ailigh to open. Everyone watched as she unrolled a flyer for a magic show at the public library. “So much for leave no trace,” she said with a smile.
Photo by Megan Padilla
A Pageant that Celebrates the North Shore
Touchstones for visits to Grand Marais always include rock skipping, cinnamon cake doughnuts from World’s Best Donuts, and a bag of books from Drury Lane. Serendipity shapes everything else. Once, we camped during the same weekend as the Wooden Boat Festival, when the harbor outside North House Folk School brimmed with an array of hand-built wooden watercraft.
On Friday night, we wandered into a community contra dance in the very workshop where we had first seen the kayak under construction. I begged my ninth grader to come with me for “just 15 minutes.” Two sweaty hours later, we left exhilarated after whirling through line dances with 80 strangers, from kids to grandparents, as fiddlers played without pause and the caller somehow kept her voice.
The next evening brought the Summer Solstice Pageant. Wrapped in blankets and sitting in camp chairs we brought to the campus courtyard, we were swept into a spectacle of giant puppets, tongue-in-cheek local characters (including massive mosquitos with great dance moves), and original music played and sung by locals against the majestic backdrop of Lake Superior. The Solstice Pageant hit every note: community, creativity, and connection. It was one of those nights that defies replication.
On Sunday morning, we joined the North House community for fika—coffee and pastry in good company. We settled into a mostly full picnic table where I met Catherine, whose father teaches the annual cedar-strip boatbuilding course. We slipped into easy conversation, sat together for a canoe presentation, and planted the seed of a friendship we still enjoy.
Courtesy of North House Folk School
Since my family’s first days as Minnesotans in 2019, the North House Folk School has been our North Star of the North Shore. It draws us to its hearth where we unplug, recharge, and are reminded that we made the right decision in making Minnesota our home.
