Ferrum, VA, August 8, 2025 — It is with deep sorrow that Ferrum College shares the news of the passing of Professor Emeritus Pete Crow on July 30, 2025. Friends, colleagues, alumni, and the community are invited to a memorial gathering on Sunday, August 31, at 2 p.m. at the Phoebe Needles Center in Callaway, VA. This will be a celebration of Pete’s life and legacy with a potluck meal and music by Gabe Robey and friends.
A native of Winston-Salem, NC, Pete earned his undergraduate degree from Davidson College, a master’s degree from Florida State University, and a Ph.D. from Duke University. After teaching for one year at Stratford College in Danville, VA, he spent 35 years on the English faculty of Ferrum College. He and his wife, Beth Crow ‘79, raised their children, Rob and Amy, in Ferrum. They have two grandchildren.
After Pete came to Ferrum College in 1973, he was one of the new young faculty members who developed the curriculum for the transition from a junior college to a baccalaureate institution awarding its first four-year degrees in 1976. He was a leader of the High Mountain Association, a student hiking and backpacking club. He helped create other gatherings in those early years that brought students and community together for conversation and recreation in the village of Ferrum.
Pete’s many academic leadership roles included chair of the languages and literature division several times between 1975 and 2005. He chaired a Summer Study Team for strategic planning in 1995 that undertook an in-depth study of the College and recommended changes in the academic climate that had lasting influence. He taught a variety of literature and composition courses, and directed the Composition Center for a number of years.
Pete’s distinguished awards include the National Outstanding Educator Award from the United Methodist Church Board of Higher Education in 2003, the Ferrum College Cheatham Fellowship in 2001, and Ferrum College’s Exemplary Teacher Award in 1997. He was appointed as the Forrest S. and Jean B. Williams Distinguished Professor in the Humanities beginning in 2004.
His most enduring legacy at Ferrum College was creating the Appalachian Cluster, an innovative program of team teaching for first-year courses that combined experiential learning and service learning with interdisciplinary study of modernization in the Appalachian region. In 1998, Pete directed a project funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, “The Reshaping of Appalachian Culture and Landscape,” to develop this cluster of classes. Until 2020, it was an annual opportunity for students in liberal arts core classes to observe and continue Pete’s scholarly and humanitarian contributions to communities in western Virginia and West Virginia.
Pete took students and colleagues to view a variety of mountain landscapes and landmarks, to build the bunks visitors sleep in at the Hurley Community Center, to assist the high school students in St. Paul who restored the Estonoa wetlands, and to provide flood relief, tutoring and other services in these and other places such as McDowell County, WV. Amanda Tipton ‘04 said, “Dr. Crow and his Appalachian cluster creation at Ferrum College had an incredible influence on me–allowing me to embrace my identity as an Appalachian fully. I am greatly indebted to his dedication to his students, his humor, and his ability to take ideas and make something real out of them.”
Pete’s collaboration with students conducting oral interviews in southwest Virginia led him to pursue extensive research in the coal towns of St. Paul and Dante, and write an innovative book of social history, Do, Die, or Get Along: A Tale of Two Appalachian Towns (University of Georgia Press, 2006). He also wrote the entry on “Mill Town Families” in Encyclopedia of Appalachia and several other articles on college English and regional education, as well as dozens of book reviews for local newspapers.
Pete also directed three month-long National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institutes for College and University Teachers at Ferrum College from 2002 to 2006, focusing on “Regional Study and the Liberal Arts: An Appalachian Exemplar.” After he retired, he collaborated with four other Appalachian Cluster faculty at the College to write “Experiential Learning in the Rural, Small College Setting–Creating an ‘Appalachian Cluster,’” a book chapter in The Synergistic Classroom: Interdisciplinary Teaching in the Small College Classroom (Rutgers University Press, 2020).
Professor Emerita Susan Mead wrote, “Pete transformed my career when he invited me to join his unique Appalachian studies faculty team at Ferrum College. He gave me, as a young colleague, the confidence to become a community-based scholar who grew so much under his guidance that, in time, I mentored him in turn. THAT is what education should be all about: nudging fledglings through the process until they soar. I would not be who I am personally or professionally without the deep impact Pete Crow had on my life; and neither would the thousands of students, colleagues, and community members he influenced the world over.”
Pete’s talents extended to storytelling, creative writing, and acting as well. He performed in more than one history play written by Rex Stephenson for Ferrum College’s Blue Ridge Dinner Theatre. They include an early production of its first play, Too Free for Me, based on records discovered by history professors about a Franklin County woman who proved in court she was not a slave in 1851.
Pete’s own storytelling often focused on his folksy and wise alter ego Old Joe Grady. He appeared in two public radio series, one on these original stories in 1996-2000 and one on Appalachia in 2000. A novel that he completed recently, Staying Alive in Bear Country, is scheduled for publication in July 2026. It grew out of the Old Joe Grady tales and, as his family describes it, “a lifetime of stories, hiking trips, and family adventures.”
Before he retired, Pete also created an experiential travel course involving Ferrum students in cultural exchange with a Muslim community in England. His other efforts in support of cultural understanding and social justice included writing letters with students for Amnesty International during his years advising the English Club and numerous activities through his membership at St. Peter’s in the Mountains Episcopal Church. Before retirement, he studied Spanish to facilitate service work that he continued in North Carolina and Nicaragua, such as tutoring Spanish-speaking children as they learn English.
Ferrum College Provost Delia Heck wrote, “Pete was the living embodiment of Ferrum College’s motto, ‘Not Self, But Others.’ He had the unique ability to be present with every student, colleague, child, or person he interacted with. I am reminded of Henry David Thoreau’s words in Walden: ‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.’ Pete lived life to its fullest, with intentionality, deliberateness, and authenticity. His legacy at Ferrum College and beyond testifies to that fact.”
Ferrum College President Mirta Martin said, “Pete Crow was more than an extraordinary educator—he was a mentor, a colleague, and a friend to generations of Ferrum College students, faculty, and community members. His vision, dedication, and warmth helped shape the College into the vibrant, caring community it is today. While we mourn his loss, we celebrate the profound and lasting impact he made on our College family. His spirit will forever be part of the Ferrum College story.”
About the photographs:
Yearbook photo of Pete Crow receiving teaching award from Ferrum College President Jerry Boone in 1997.
Pete Crow on right with Appalachian Cluster students and faculty at the Clinch River when he met the group in St. Paul, VA in 2017.
Pete Crow listening to Appalachian Cluster students at Grace House in St. Paul, VA in 2017.
