First published: Winter 2024/2025
Minnie Adkins began whittling creatures as a way to help support her family but, along the way, she became a Kentucky success story
Minnie Adkins is 90 years old. She was born into a poor-but-proud family in Isonville, a low-income part of Kentucky, and has lived there most of her life. She is primarily known as a wood carver, quilter and painter, but since 1992 she has also been working on children’s books.
Black Horse, 2014; M Norris
Adkins was just six years old when she began carving – an uncommon hobby for girls at the time – using a pocket knife loaned to her by her uncle until her father found out and reluctantly gave her one of her own. “I didn’t know anything about art,” she says. “But I did make sling shots and pop guns, bows and arrows, and other things ... because we didn’t have a lot to play with.”
Fox, 2015, Kelly Ludwig
She and her siblings were expected to help with the farm work, including growing tobacco. “It was just a hard way of making a living back then,” Adkins recalls. She quit school after ninth grade and at 18 married Garland Adkins, and the couple went on to have a son. By 1969, work in Eastern Kentucky had dried up, so the family moved to Fairborn, Ohio, near Dayton. It was here that, to help bring in money, Adkins began carving wooden roosters to sell. She would hunt the nearby woods for the right kind of sticks – often maple tree twigs and branches – sometimes paying her young son, Mike, a small amount to gather them for her. She would then sell the unpainted wooden roosters at a local flea market. She continued to make her carvings when the family moved back to Isonville in 1983, expanding her repertoire to include a range of creatures and selling them directly from home.
Roach Terminator, 2012, M Norris
By MARGARET DAY ALLEN
This is an article extract; read the full article in Raw Vision #121.
