Mary “Molly” Gregory was a talented and determined woodworker who used her skills widely, from constructing farm structures, and renovating and building homes, to designing and building custom furniture that would eventually be displayed in museums.
She’s perhaps best known for her time at Black Mountain College, a liberal arts college founded by John Rice on a farm in rural North Carolina. Often touted as “a grand experiment,” Black Mountain College was rooted in progressive education philosophies and drew many well-known modernist artists. Students and faculty built much of the campus themselves, including buildings and furnishings.
In his book “The Farm at Black Mountain College,” David Silver describes Molly as his “personal MVP of BMC [Black Mountain College].” In his Spring 2010 essay in Northern Woodlands, Robert Kimber, who knew Molly personally, writes that he and his wife named their son, Gregory, after her. Molly continues to inform and inspire, as exemplified in Holly Gore’s recent doctoral dissertation featuring case studies of modernist woodworkers from the 1930s to 1970s, “where work is actually itself the medium,” including Molly.
In “Curator Conversations: Woodworking, Labor, and Modernism with Holly Gore,” Gore shares a picture of Molly in the woodworking shop that she ran, taught classes from and helped build at Black Mountain College. Community, Gore says, was at the heart of the curriculum. As was its experiment with democracy. Woodworking was a core activity that not only produced objects, but also citizens. Black Mountain College gave Molly access to leadership and treated her not as a consumer but as a citizen.
With thanks to Lost Art Press researcher extraordinaire Suzanne Ellison for the suggestion, here’s Molly’s story.
Born in 1914, Molly was raised on a farm in Framingham, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. During the Depression, she attended the Beaver Country Day School, a progressive, all-girls’ high school founded in 1920. One of its founders, Mabel Warren Bradley, leaned heavily on John Dewey’s educational philosophy of learning by doing, a philosophy Molly also embraced.
“John Dewey was influential at Beaver, so I’d been ‘Deweyized’ from the beginning,” Molly said in a 1997 interview, part of “The Mary Emma Harris and Black Mountain College Project Inc. Oral History Collection” from Appalachian State University.
In 1932, Molly was one of 87 women to enroll in the inaugural class at Bennington College, a liberal arts women’s college, where she studied sculpture. She graduated in 1936 and got a job teaching elementary-aged children at The Cambridge School of Weston.
“While hired to teach sculpture, Molly also taught ceramics, and life drawing, and oversaw athletics and directed the woodshop,” Silver wrote. “She particularly enjoyed her time with shop teacher Alfred Hulst, who helped Molly refine the woodworking and building skills she had learned on the family farm.”
Molly had several friends and acquaintances who had various connections to Black Mountain College. Molly’s Bennington roommate, Ruth Bailey, attended Black Mountain College after leaving Bennington. Harper’s Magazine published the story of Black Mountain College – “Education on a mountain” by Louis Adamic, which Molly read. Molly visited Black Mountain College several times. She liked its focus on community over self, and the students and faculty liked her. She was also ready for a change.
“It was clear that if I stayed in sculpture, I was going to be a teacher for the rest of my life because I wasn’t a good enough sculptor,” she said in her oral history.
So in 1941, Molly drove her 1935 V-8 Ford to North Carolina and enrolled at Black Mountain College as an apprentice teacher and a student of Josef Albers. After one semester, she was both student and teacher, leading classes in woodworking and sculpture.
“Molly established regular shop hours six days a week during which any member of the community could learn woodworking skills and work on projects,” Silver wrote. “Most importantly, Molly transformed the woodshop from a space where somewhat random individual works were produced to an organized shop with a mission: to build much-needed items for Black Mountain College.”
On its website, Black Mountain College describes Molly as someone who quickly proved herself indispensable, “particularly during the war years when she led the work program and oversaw those aspects of campus life crucial to its survival. She took over the woodworking shop begun by Robert Bliss and oversaw the completion of the Studies Building. Nearly all of the furnishings and designs for the student studies, dormitories, and academic and agricultural buildings were created in the woodworking shop with instruction by Gregory.”
Molly built a conference table for the faculty room in the Studies Building and helped make tables for the dining room. Also out of the shop came kitchen cupboards, drafting tables, bookshelves, carving benches and more.
“In November 1942, just over a year after Molly’s arrival, the woodshop was humming with do-it-yourself activity,” Silver writes.
Students were constructing their own benches for the weaving department and building milk racks for the kitchen, according to Silver. A professor used the shop to make a table and cabinets for his study.
“With Molly at the helm, the woodshop trained a new generation of students how to hammer, saw, and drill – how to make things,” Silver wrote.
While working on the Studies Building, Molly took it upon herself to also fix up the few power tools they had.
“So, there was a buzz saw [circular saw], and there was a jointer, and there was a drill press and so on, but nobody had time to fix them up or get them going,” she said in her oral history. “I did that because I thought a buzz saw would be a help. It was terribly interesting because for me the idea of ripping boards by hand when you had a buzz saw was for the birds. But the North Carolinian carpenters thought nothing of ripping miles of boards, just by hand.”
During the war, Molly was also instrumental in developing a farm at Black Mountain College, one that yielded enough produce to feed the entire community. One of the first things she did was create plans for a milking house. She designed and helped build new fences and multiple structures, including one to store farm machinery, a bullpen, a hog pen, a henhouse and a beef shed.
“Molly designed the hog house and built it entirely in the woodshop, constructing six-foot prefabricated sections, lugging the pieces to the farm, and assembling them in situ,” Silver wrote.
“As a Quaker Friend, Gregory’s influence can perhaps be found most readily in The Quiet House, a building designed and built with student Alex Reed in memory of Mark Dreier, the young son of BMC founders Ted and Bobbie Dreier, who died in a vehicle accident on campus,” according to Black Mountain College. “The benches of The Quiet House resonate with the Quaker influence and invite contemplation.”
In short time, Molly was wearing many hats. She was the supervisor of the woodshop. She was teaching full-time. She ran the farm books. And she was the farm manager.
“Truth be told, Molly was exhausted,” Silver wrote.
Molly left Black Mountain College in 1947 and moved to Woodstock, Vermont, where she ran a woodworking shop – Woodstock Enterprises, owned by a former Black Mountain College student, David Bailey – for six years.
Woodstock Enterprises focused on custom furniture and cabinetry, as well as remodeling and general construction projects.
In 1953, Molly decided to go out on her own. She founded her own woodworking shop, in Lexington, Massachusetts, and then in Lincoln, Massachusetts. For nearly 35 years, she designed furniture for homes and churches, did custom interior work, and renovated and built houses. She had several employees who worked for her.
In Lincoln, Molly lived in an apartment she built for herself, located inside a barn owned by friends, Kimber wrote. Her shop was located on the barn’s ground floor. She also had a Jersey cow, chickens and a dog named Griselda whom she called Grum.
“Although she had grown up on a farm and wound up running the farm at Black Mountain College, where she had gone to teach in 1941, she was, first and foremost, a woodworker, the very best of several first-rate ones it’s been my good luck to know,” Kimber wrote. “She could do it all. From designing and building a house to fine cabinetmaking to intricate carvings for a church altar. And along with everything she knew about woods and their properties and tools and their uses, she had an artist’s eye, which she had developed to a high level working with Josef Albers at Black Mountain. Whatever she built, whether barn or sideboard, had clean, simple lines and seemed just made for whatever setting it was in.”
Kimber also noted her problem-solving ability.
“Once, when she’d been installing a set of classy and expensive kitchen counters and cabinets, a knot broke out of the middle of one of the counters,” he wrote. “What to do? She made an inlay in the shape of a leaping dolphin, converting a disaster into a beautiful decorative detail. ‘If you can’t hide it,’ she said, ‘feature it.’”
She also continued to teach on the side.
“I had a wonderful job at Concord Academy working with the students in carving,” she said in her oral history. “We built a chapel and carved the altar and made the steeple.”
Molly taught woodworking at Concord Academy from 1958 to 1972. Memorabilia, Memories, Memorials, published by Concord Academy in 2010, notes “Students under her direction carved the Corinthians panels mounted at the front of the Chapel, the altar, lectern, and music stands.”
She also taught at Shady Hill School and Belmont Day School.
At 85 years old, Molly could no longer live in the barn. She moved to The New England Friends Home in Hingham, Massachusetts, where she spent her time quilting and watercolor painting.
Although she was not allowed to have pets, Kimber writes, “She built a small-scale fire escape, not for herself but for her cat, Sophia, who used that unobtrusive structure to leave and enter Molly’s second-story room day or night, unseen by other residents or the staff. Sophia occasionally brought red squirrels along too, some alive, who would often find refuge in Molly’s closet.”
A few years before her death, a sideboard she made in the early 1960s was part of an exhibition called “The Maker’s Hand: American Studio Furniture, 1940 to 1990” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. (See the accompanying book by Edward S. Cooke, here.)
Describing the sideboard, Cooke writes, “Her small shop (which had a few male employees) produced furniture, including a large walnut sideboard in a distinctive mode that blends a variety of joinery and ornamental characteristics. Especially notable in the sideboard are the arched support at the base and the rhythmic drawer arrangement; a large cupboard for trays is also cleverly included at the back of the case.”
Molly died November 21, 2006, in Hingham, Massachusetts.
After her death, her work was featured in a 2014 exhibition called “Black Mountain College: Shaping Craft + Design” at the Black Mountain College Museum
Her work has also been on display at the Asheville Art Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Sources
- “52 Mary ‘Molly’ Gregory (1914-2006).” The Mary Emma Harris and Black Mountain College Project, Inc. Oral History collection, AC-564. Special Collections Research Center. Accessed December 9, 2025. https://appstate-speccoll.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/125804
- “Celebrating 100 years of Beaver.” Beaver Country Day School. Accessed December 9, 2025. https://bcdschool.org/100-years-of-beaver/
- Kimber, Robert. “A Fine Woodworker.” Northern Woodlands. Spring 2010. https://northernwoodlands.org/articles/article/a-fine-woodworker
- “Mary Gregory.” Black Mountain College Museum Arts Center. Accessed December 16, 2025. https://bmcyearbook.org/bio/mary-gregory
- “Mary Gregory (aka Molly).” Asheville Art Museum. Accessed December 9, 2025. https://collection.ashevilleart.org/artist-maker/info/1625
- Memorabilia, Memories, Memorial. Concord Academy. December 3, 2010. https://issuu.com/concord_academy/docs/mmm_final_/9
- “Molly Gregory.” Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. Accessed December 9, 2025. https://www.blackmountaincollege.org/molly-gregory/
- Silver, David. “The Farm at Black Mountain College.” Atelier Editions and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. December 17, 2024.
- “Vision and History.” Bennington College. Accessed December 9, 2025. https://www.bennington.edu/about/vision-and-history