Museum of Appalachia...

While driving to Wing Ding along I-75 in Tennessee, Claude noted signs for the Museum of Appalachia. He mentioned it to me. Then, while having dinner Friday night with friends at Wing Ding, the Crawfords mentioned they went there during the day on Friday and enjoyed it. Hmmm...maybe we should make a stop there on the way home.  We did stop there and had a wonderful tourist visit.

The setting is vintage back country America in these parts. Green trees, green grass, old frame homes and the laid back feel of being in the country. It doesn't take long for one to relax and understand the term 'down home'.

I took 50,000,000 pictures (that is an exaggeration). But I did take a lot and will not share them all on this blog entry.

This museum was founded in 1969 and portrays an authentic mountain farm/village with three dozen historic log structures, exhibit buildings, gardens, split rail fences and farm animals. John Rice Irwin is the founder and he traveled the back roads to collect thousands of everyday items from the mountain folk of Southern Appalachia to use in this museum. The village is set to be authentic in every detail. Cabins are furnished as the families would have used them.

The entrance building is set by the parking lot. You pay your entry fee here, there is a great gift shop and a little place to get something to eat and drink. You are given a map of the museum, which is very helpful, and you just follow it for your own self-guided tour.

After passing the Stewart Cabin and the Gwen Sharp Playhouse (a playhouse built for a little girl) we entered the Appalachian Hall of Fame. This building is two story and houses lots of different types of exhibits. One of my favorite sections was devoted to the music and musical instruments of the mountain people. I'm telling you...these people could make an instrument out of anything, and they did, and here is pictoral proof.

Let's look at banjos made of lots of interesting things.  Hub caps, jaw bones, toilet seat, bed pan, cookie can, ham can and plain old wood.

Now let's view some other interesting musical instruments. The first is a 'courting dulcimer'. It was called that because two people could play at one time, one on each side, and their knees could touch while they were play. Oh the joy of it all!!! The second is an ironing board steel guitar. I told you, they make instruments out of e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g!!!

Not only musical instruments were made from whatever was at hand, they made wheelchairs out of what they had on hand as well.

There were items in this particular building that were fun for me to see. The original music score for the "Tennessee Waltz", the story of the music for "Under the Double Eagle", a beautiful clay pot with a poppy painted on the front, interesting caskets, lots of things carved out of wood, some pottery, a very old dentist chair and drill (ouch!!), and the list goes on.

From the Hall of Fame we walked past the re-enactors drilling on the field. We ached for them in those heavy itchy looking wool clothes out in the hot sunshine. But they are doing what they enjoy. And, it is always interesting to watch and learn from those who really study these things and then re-enact them for those of us who don't study those things quite as much. I get to sort of enjoy the Reader's Digest Condensed version of history.

We passed these awful looking jail cells. They are literally metal cubes built like a box car. Inside attached to the walls are four bunks. They could be left up on the walls during the day and four prisoners could have that tiny floor space to be in. At night, the four bunks would come down and fill the entire interior of these cells. Now, that is enough to make one behave so one does not have to live in such unelegance (I think I just made up a word!).

The Display Barn was our next stop. It houses a collection of frontier and pioneer memorabilia. There is an old country song titled, "The Letter Edged in Black". In this building was a replica of a very small post office space and on the wall was this picture of a letter, literally edged in black. It seems they really sent you a letter with black edges upon the death of a love one.

I also found the 'trap' for little pesky animals amusing. It is simply a post with a hinge mounted on it. One side of the hinge has a rope tied to it with a corn cob attached to the other end of the rope. One top of the opened hinge is a rock. The pesky little animal sees the corn, desires the corn, grabs the corn and yanks, the hinge closes, the rock falls and oopsy daisy the little critter is at minimum stunned and at maximum meets it is bleedin' demised as they say in Monty Python. The things that I found most cute was the museum placing an animal pelt on the ground under this exhibit. Cracked me right up.

Over our 41 years of marriage, Claude and I have toured lots of old homes and museums with old things and old ways of doing things. In all those tours I have never seen the following item. It is a 'marble mill'. It is a huge stone with a hole in it. The person would place a rock in that hole and move the stone under a waterfall. Over time the water would pour over that hole and the rock inside would roll around eventually smoothing out the edges of the rock. The end result after enough time was a marble. Hence, 'marble mill' . I found this very clever and then thought as I walked away... "I wonder who gets to move that heavy rock under the water fall?" Just wondering.

Our next stop was the People's Building. There was a man named Harrison Mayes. He was a coal miner and he made huge stone crosses which he placed all across the United States and even some other countries around the world. This was his life's work and he felt very strongly about it. A collection of these crosses can be found beside and under the porch of this building.

Inside is the bicycle he used to ride around on to get his message out to people. He would put the initial PAE on items he made. He would not tell anyone what those initials stood for. However, prior to his death he confided to a close relative that they stood for 'Planetary, Aviational, Evangelistic'. He had aspirations of one of his crosses being placed on the moon. I think he was an eccentric fellow who had a passion for something in his life and he truly gave it his all.

The rest of the museum is individual homes and buildings, furnished to period. I'm only going to share a few in this blog entry. The first is the Mark Twain Family Cabin. It was moved to the Museum of Appalachia from'Possum Trot, Tennessee. Mark Twain never lived in this house but his family did. He was born five months after the family left Tennessee.

There is a blacksmith shop,

and Sharp's Corn Mill,

and General Bunch's house. General Bunch helped to build this home when he was eight years old. Here is what he said on a visit to Museum of Appalachia and seeing his old childhood home, "The old house was built by my daddy, Pryor Bunch. He had twelve children and we was all raised in them two rooms. I was just eight years old, but I drug the logs in from the mountains with a yoke of oxen. We had to walk twelve miles across the mountains to the nearest store where we could buy a bag of salt." (And here I sit in my lovely home with air conditioning and a hubby cooking dinner on a nice electric stove!)

There was the McClung House which I felt a special attachment to for it reminded me of my Grampa and Gramma Fisch's home in Louisiana. Their home had a long front porch across the front like this. It was made of wood boards just like this. It had wooden shingles on top just like this. AND...it had a hallway down the middle just like this. Gramma and Grampa Fisch's home had big double wooden doors at each end of the hall through the middle. These doors were closed at night but during the day they opened into the hallway. In the afternoons, my mother took handmade old quilts and laid them on the floor. We were expected to lay down and rest on these pallets as we called them. I remember those lovely southern breezes that came through those hall ways and brushed over my little kid cheeks. It felt so good. A gentle breeze still takes me back to those hallway naps on pallets and that feeling of peace and comfort I felt then. In the Fisch home the left side of the house has a bedroom on the front and the back of the house with a door between them. On the right side of the hallway was a large room used as the living room and my grandparents bedroom. There was a door on the right side of that room into the big room along that right outside wall of their house. It was the kitchen and there was a window looking out onto the front yard. There was also a door to the back porch from this long kitchen. In front of their living room/bedroom was a pantry for home canned foods. I loved this old home place. Lots of very good memories were made here.

This building is the Cox Corn Crib. There are several corn cribs in the museum. These were used to store corn to be used during the winter. They are usually raised from the ground and you might often find where mice and other animals gnawed to get inside for the grain. That food was precious to the residents as well as the animals and it was a constant struggle to keep the little critters out of your food storage. This corn crib happens to also have a covered place for the wagon.

"Dan'l Boone" has his home in this museum. The cabin is undergoing some restoration work at this time. It was actually built in the early 1800's and is a one room dirt floor construction. It was really used in the CBS TV series Young Dan'l Boone.

There is just something reverent about the mountain churches. Even in their poverty, they built places of worship. They are simple structures with lots of heart and soul to them. They may be one of my favorite buildings in the rural areas. I loved the ones we found in Cades Cove a few years ago. Papa and I sing a song titled "There's a Chapel in the Hills" about these little buildings and the faith of the people who lived and worshipped in them. I always have a picture of these lovely buildings in my head when we sing that song.

I just love the name of this building. It is the Big Tater Valley Schoolhouse. What do you have for a mascot when you are from the Big Tater Valley? The other cute thing about this building, besides its name, were the outhouse on either side. They are not in the picture. They have one for the boys and one for the girls.

This is an underground dairy. There was no refrigeration and digging under the ground was the best way to keep milk and eggs and things like that cool.

And some of those villages had their still to make their spirits.

The Joe Diehl Saw Mill is still operable. They saw logs here on special occasions.

This type of barn is called an 'overhang' or 'cantilever' barn. It was moved to the Museum from Sevier County, Tennessee. That part of Tennessee is one of the few places to see this style of barn which originated in Switzerland. There were several of these in Cade Cove also.

Claude held the gate for me, as every gentleman should for his lady, and we both were amused at the use of a kettle as the weight to help the gate stay closed. Doesn't Claude make a cute Vanna White?

You just need mountain music by mountain people when you visit the mountains. We were not to be disappointed. These people sang away and I harmonized with them as I toured. I did pause and listen to a great rendition of 'Orange Blossom Special'. The lady of this group had CD's set up and I purchased two of them. One is of old county songs and one is of old gospel songs. I knew a lot of the songs on each CD...hmmmm...I'm either old or I grew up with someone who is old and still sings those songs each Wednesday at the nursing home and I sing with him. I think it might be a bit of both. The ladies voice is not the best as far as vocalists go. But I truly enjoyed it because it was a real mountain voice with accents that are just right. I've listened to them each once in my car and I'll now share them with Papa. 

The other thing that made this visit such great fun was...peacocks...that's right, peacocks. I'm not sure they are authentic Appalachian peacocks. But I was pretty sure that was the sound I was hearing as we toured one end of the museum. When we got to the other end of the museum, sure enough, there were two male peacocks with their tail feathers spread and making quite a display. One stayed with tail feathers spread while I sat on the rock wall and talked and took picture after picture. They were beautiful birds. Here are a couple of my favorite shots of these birds. The first picture is of the peacock turning his head and listening as I talked to him.

The Museum of Appalachia is set around a beautiful green, grassy field. Here are a couple of shots across the field.

I'm including this picture, well, cause I love it and it is the kind of picture I love to take, and it is my blog and I can.

Claude and I totally enjoyed visiting the Museum of Appalachia in Tennessee. There is a lot of heart in this place. As we exited my final pictures were of the chicken crossing sign and the peach tree in front of our car laden with peaches. How Southern can you get?  I mean really.