Varick Chittenden ’63, M’66 thinks the folk arts of the North Country are worth saving.  In 1986 he founded Traditional Arts in Upstate New York, which he continues to serve as executive director, as a hub for the study, preservation and promotion of North Country ways of life. He has organized programs on traditional and contemporary folk art, heirloom quilts, French and Mohawk influences, food customs, front-porch music, waterfowl decoys, and many other expressions of regional folkways.

Organizations ranging from local historical societies, libraries and galleries to the National Endowment for the Arts have benefited from his expertise and energy. He has published books, exhibition catalogs and articles, produced a radio series and been a grant reviewer for several organizations. He has been president of Canton’s Grasse River Heritage Area Development Corporation since 1999.

A descendant of some of the earliest settlers in the St. Lawrence Valley, Chittenden holds both his bachelor’s and his first master’s degree from St. Lawrence, where he majored in English and was on the men’s hockey team. He taught at SUNY Canton from 1969 until 2001, when he was named emeritus professor of English. During that period he earned his second master’s degree, an M.A. in American folk culture at SUNY Oneonta’s Cooperstown Graduate Program.

“I’ve been at this long enough to know that when I see something disappear, I wish somebody had written down something about it while they had the chance,” he says. “My goal is to create an archive that people 50 or 100 years from now will have access to and use.”

For his contributions to his native region, Varick Chittenden was awarded an Alumni Citation by St. Lawrence on Reunion Weekend 2004. At that time he credited St. Lawrence with sparking his interest in local culture and giving him “two degrees, an inquiring mind and a source of artistic and cultural vitality.”