| Tennessee museum shows farm life back in old times |
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| By RICHARD R. SITLER
Indiana Correspondent
NORRIS, Tenn. — Visit the Museum of Appalachia in Norris, and you step back in time to when haystacks rose as high as the buildings and a farming community included a blacksmith shop and a gristmill.
With today’s modern conveniences and economy, farming has become big business. Farm work is accomplished by the use of high-tech machinery and is done on a large scale, but involves fewer people to tend the farm.
The period of farm life represented in this living history farm museum shows a time when farming was not merely an economic business, but a true way of life that involved whole families and communities. Today, it is difficult to distinguish a small community in a farming area from any other community, though the presence of a grain elevator or a farm implement store might be a clue.
With a tour of The Old Homestead, as well as the rest of the grounds of the Appalachia museum, it is apparent that in the old days every part of the community revolved around agriculture. A list of some of the buildings preserved and gathered here by museum founder John Rise Irwin attests to the importance of farming to the whole community in pioneer times.
There is the Leather Shop, Blacksmith Shop and Wheelwright Shop, the Bunch Smokehouse, the Old Sharp Corn Mill, the Homestead Smokehouse and Granary, the Underground Dairy, the Joe Diehl Sawmill, the Hacker Martin Gristmill and more.
Over almost 50 years, Irwin collected these buildings and other artifacts from the isolated backroads of eastern Tennessee and parts of Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina and other contiguous states. Although the buildings creating the farm come from all over, they represent what a farming community in Appalachia pioneer times would have looked like.
Before getting too nostalgic and sentimental about farming in the days of old, one must also remember the hardships. Exploring some of the displays at the museum gives a good idea of the difficulties of everyday life before electricity, refrigeration and indoor plumbing.
The broom and rope house is a good example of the hard work involved in housekeeping in pioneer times.
According to museum literature, “Broomcorn was grown by almost every early family and made into round brooms, consisting of a few bunches of broom straw tied together on a stick. The wooden ‘geared and cogged’ rope-making machine enabled one to make any size rope desired by twisting three similar strands into one.”
The Appalachian residents of old couldn’t just go to Wal-Mart and buy a broom; like anything else they needed, they either had to make it themselves or find someone in their community who made it.
The lack of refrigeration was dealt with in creative ways. The underground dairy displayed at the museum is one example of how pioneers stored perishable food. According to museum literature, “Most early families built their homes near a cold spring, but this was not always possible … The alternative was a ‘dug-out’ with only the door and roof exposed.” This dug-out wood building was not very large, but being built into the ground, it maintained a cooler temperature to delay the food from spoiling.
Touring the grounds of the Museum of Appalachia really makes one stop and think about how back then everyone’s lives were more connected to the earth and the act of producing food. Their lives depended on having the ability to wrestle a livelihood from the land.
To go “back in time,” visit the museum, located 16 miles north of Knoxville, Tenn.
There are many other, similar living history museums that depict farm life in the old days, including Conner Prairie in Fishers, Ind., Schoenbrunn Village in New Philadelphia, Ohio, Coopersville Farm Museum in Coopersville, Mich., and Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Harrodsville, Ky.
This farm news was published in the Sept. 19, 2007 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee. |
| 9/19/2007 |
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