ELLAMORE – A new wedding venue owned and operated by a local couple has opened up in Upshur County.

Casey Jo Cottrill and Zack Cottrill built the venue Oren + Folk from the ground up and recently finished construction.

“We build it ourselves, along with my stepdad and my mom, so we just started construction in March and just finished, two weeks ago,” Casey Jo Cottrill said. “We had our first wedding with a close family friend. We didn’t advertise or anything before we had that wedding, because we just wanted to make sure we didn’t have any major hiccups.”

The venue features a barn that is 2,600 square feet that sits on 63 private acres. She said they also offer packages with tables and chairs for up to 100 people for any event such as a wedding, reunion or baby shower.

“I got into the wedding industry through photography, which was also not something that I had ever really planned to do,” Cottrill said. “I got a nice camera and took some pictures for some people, and that kind of snowballed, so I loved the wedding industry and then my husband and I purchased the property the barn sits on two years ago.”

“It’s like 63 acres and it was our dream property,” she added.

She said they loved the property and weren’t able to build a home yet, so they wanted to be able to share the beauty of the land with the community.

“We have this property that we love, and it’s like our baby, but we weren’t able to do anything with it yet because we just weren’t able to build a house yet, so we asked ourselves, ‘what are we going to do with it?’” Cottrill said. “It started as an idea that we could have ceremonies out there because the field is beautiful. We decided we could share it with people because I want people to be able to enjoy it as much as we do, and that kind of snowballed into the idea of building a space for receptions.”

The land is located 20 minutes from Buckhannon, off the Old Elkins Road, behind the Nay Chapel, where there is a gravel driveway that leads to the barn.

“My career is psychology, but my passion is decorating, designing, planning and those kinds of things, so I just planned it all and designed it all, and my husband and stepdad made it happen structurally,” Cottrill said. “We have spent every free hour since March building and painting and doing all of it, getting it ready for the first wedding, and it just has grown more than I ever even could have imagined.”

She said they originally wanted to build the barn from the trees on the property, but Hunter Smallridge said it was more efficient to use hemlock from Alexander.

“He said there was a guy that has some property out there that his crew was timbering, and he owns a sawmill so he could saw it for us,” she said. “So, all of our lumber for our flooring, tables, siding, beams – everything except for the trusses – is hemlock that was cut here in Upshur County.”

Cottrill explained the significance in the name, Oren + Folk.

“Hemlock is a form of pine and Oren is Hebrew for pine and there’s also a lot of pine trees around the outside of the barn, so ‘Oren’ represents the land and the barn and ‘Folk’ represents all the people that will gather there.”

The barn also features two dressing rooms, one with a private bathroom; two guest bathrooms; and there will eventually be a kitchen. Oren + Folk has a website with a contact form at http://www.orenandfolk.com and they are also on Facebook and Instagram.