Mabel Pechta creates true folk art.

If you live in Moran, a small village about 12 miles northwest of St. Ignace, you might very well own “a Mabel” and count yourself among a select group of “Mabel” owners across the country.

Mabel Pechta is the village’s Grandma Moses. Born on Christmas Day in 1911, the 96-year-old has lived in Moran and nearby Ozark her entire life, except for a few years elsewhere for schooling.

Mabel is a self-taught artist who displays her whimsical three-dimensional brown-tone collages at annual yard sales in front of her home on U.S.-123, directly across from the railroad track that was once Moran’s lifeline and is now a snowmobile and dirt bike trail.

Throughout the hot, dry 2007 Labor Day weekend, Mabel sat at her yard sale, ignoring the dust clouds churned up by speeding dirt bikes across the street. Her patience was rewarded: she sold all but one of her collages, as well as much of her pickled vegetables and jams. “I’ve never sold so many collages in a single weekend before,” she says with obvious pleasure.

Mabel’s work meets many of the widely varying criteria that define folk art. For one thing, she is virtually untrained.

“I’ve had no art training at all and I don’t know tiddly-two about it,” she says. She developed her distinct brown-tone style after taking a single collage lesson in the 1970s, “from a Pickford lady.”

Her subjects range from churches, farms, and water wheels, to locomotives, and—her best-selling scenes—logging camps and lighthouses of the Upper Peninsula. Although her repertoire of scenes hasn’t changed much over the years, her works are not cookie-cutter repeats. Her simple themes and production methods are also characteristic of true folk art.

Working at her kitchen table, Mabel builds her collages on plywood boards and, occasionally, circular saw blades. She often uses folded cloth filled with cotton batting as a foreground plane. Cardboard and egg cartons are transformed into lighthouses, farmhouses, churches, bridges, and trains. Local plants that she collects, such as sweet clover, Timothy weed, cedar boughs and grasses become birch trees, bushes and other flora. Cattail reeds become cabin logs and Lake Superior stones are laid out to form fences and wells. Viewers feel compelled to touch the three-dimensional features of “a Mabel”—an infectiousness that is another quality of folk art.

After the collage is fully formed, Mabel covers it first with gesso (plaster of paris or gypsum prepared with glue for use in painting), then with white semigloss paint, and finally with Old Master’s walnut rubbing stain. The result is akin to a sepia photograph. She uses color only when she crafts the red façade of Lake Huron’s Round Island lighthouse. A very lucky Mabel buyer might also find brightly colored window-box flowers lighting up a monotone front porch.

Although Mabel doesn’t keep track of where her works end up, she says that people from around the country call to order additional pieces. Michigan State University math teacher Elizabeth Phillips discovered one of Mabel’s yard sales several years ago on the way to Brevoort Lake. Now the owner of many “Mabels,” Elizabeth says they remind of her of “apple pie and simpler times—they have universal appeal.” Mabel has recently decided to pass on her art form by tutoring several local girls.

Mabel’s life spans the boom and bust years of Upper Peninsula settlement; she herself is as rugged as the U.P.’s glacier-carved terrain. With a twinkle in her eye, she tells of surviving cancer, her 20 surgeries, “new” knees and eyes, five heart catheterizations, pacemaker, and the two leg stents she received in August 2007. “My doctor says he’s not afraid to work on me,” she says with a laugh.

She likes to tell of her parents’ journey from Tennessee to the Upper Peninsula in 1909 to find work in Michigan’s booming logging economy and how their train was delayed for three days on a ferry stranded by ice in the Straits of Mackinac. They continued on to Ozark, where they settled and grew carrots, cabbage and beets for the lumber camps.

After ninth grade, Ozark children had to go elsewhere to continue their education. Mabel attended 10th grade in Trout Lake, several miles away. “I worked there for my room and board,” she says, “but I didn’t like the guy I worked for and wanted to quit. My parents said ‘no way are you quittin’ school.’ I moved home, and dad took me to the depot in Ozark each day to catch the train to Trout Lake. Mom and dad didn’t have the 34 cents for my round-trip fare, so each morning I would fill a suitcase with exactly five one-half gallon jars of milk and take them with me. I spent my lunch hour delivering them for a dime apiece, which paid for my fare. It was a heavy suitcase and the train would only stop to pick me up if I flagged it down, which sometimes made the conductor angry. One day, he grabbed my suitcase and broke one of my jugs of milk. It was an experience that few children have had.”

After finishing high school and an additional year at Ferris Institute, from which she received her teaching certificate, Mabel returned to Moran to teach three grades for $60 a month, a good wage then. Michigan law at the time prohibited married women from teaching, so she had to give it up when she married Harry Pechta, a Forest Service employee living in Moran. Eventually she and Harry took over the local grocery store at the height of the Great Depression, when “we didn’t have two nickels to rub together. It was hard to keep the shelves stocked, but we made it. We owned it for 26 years.”

From 1959 to 1991, Harry served on Cloverland Electric Cooperative’s board of directors, ultimately becoming its president. Some of Mabel’s first collages were displayed at the cooperative’s office. Harry passed away in 1991 and their children now live across the country, but Mabel continues to manage the family home in Moran by herself.

Several years ago, Mabel wrote a brief history of her girlhood years. Carefully penned in neat longhand interlaced with scenes and pictures she cut from magazines or drew herself, the small notebook exemplifies the industry and purposefulness of her nearly century-long life. In the hands of the right publisher, it would be a welcome addition to the recorded lore of the resilient people who settled Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.