Preserving Appalachia

I’m a lover of history, of the mountains, of the ridges and valleys of Appalachia where I spent my first 18 years. So a trip to the Museum of Appalachia to write about its 50th anniversary, well, that was just right up my alley.

I just didn’t expect to find artifacts from the East Tennessee property I inherited—where I grew up—on display. On the other hand, the Museum of Appalachia is nothing if not a celebration of the ordinary, a spotlight on the everyday lives of the people of our region.

People like Kelly and Rufus Eledge, who lived way back up in the Smoky Mountains, at the end of a narrow winding road, if it could be called that. The family used to make their own soap, in cakes, for laundry, and when they stopped, they set the old soap stand—a barrel with wooden staves—in the smokehouse, where it was forgotten.

Hobart Hagood and his son, Larry, were both rural mail carriers in Persia, Tennessee, but they were also master leather craftsmen, making and repairing saddles and harnesses for horses and mules as far away as Pennsylvania Amish country, the mines of Kentucky and Virginia, and the wealthy pleasure riders of Florida.

There was Coonrod Dove, who built a grist mill on Boone’s Creek near Johnson City in 1790 where he ground wheat for the white settlers of the area until he sold the property to Alexander Isenberg, who ground corn.

John and Jane Clemens, parents of Samuel Clemens—you know him as legendary humorist Mark Twain—lived in a small log cabin in Possum Trot, Tennessee, until they moved to Missouri, five months before their famous son’s birth in 1835.

And then there were the nameless Cherokee and Yuchi who lived in the area for centuries before our white ancestors arrived, and they left pottery and pipes, arrowheads and axeheads, trade items and tools.

All of that and more comes together in the mountains north of Knoxville because of one man—one-time Anderson County school superintendent John Rice Irwin. He collected the discarded and deteriorating remnants of the peoples’ lives—leather working tools, farm tools, musical instruments, soap stands, entire cabins, barns, and mills—and brought them to his property in Norris, where 50 years ago he opened the Museum of Appalachia, now 63-acres of Appalachian life with hundreds of thousands of artifacts from the culture of the hills:

• Here’s Jeannette Martin, pictured in her flower and herb garden, who learned about the healing properties of the mountain plants from her mother, the unofficial “doctor” of her community.
• On this wall, what’s believed to be one of the country’s oldest banjos.
• Displayed in a glass case, Asa Jackson’s perpetual motion machine that supposedly ran for days. Jackson took it apart and hid it in a cave so no one else would know how it really worked, and no one does.
• In another case, intricately carved ceremonial pipes, used long before the English sailed up the James River in Virginia.
• Quilts, delicate patterns made by hand over the decades, decorate walls in every building.
• A stone head sits alone in another case, mutely staring upward. It was found in a mound near the courthouse in Dolly Parton’s native Sevier County and dated to the 15th Century.
• One man’s quixotic drive to erect giant crosses on “the moon and 9 planets by 2020” may not be fulfilled, but his work fills half a display building.
• The table is set in General Bunch’s cabin. All that’s needed is a fire in the hearth.
• And the floor’s been swept and the benches are ready for children at the Tater Valley School House, the teacher’s name written plainly on the blackboard.

These days, many of us find no value in the details of the past. For those of us who find solace there—and perhaps aspirations for the future—the Museum of Appalachia delivers.

Elaine Irwin Meyer, Irwin’s daughter and now president of the museum, remembers tagging along as her father sought the old items he wanted to preserve.

“We’d get in the car on Saturday morning and see how far we’d get,” she says. “Of course we were children so we complained.”

Irwin seemed to have a knack for convincing the mountain folk to sell to him, although sometimes it took a while.

Kelly Eledge, who lived back up in the Smokies with her husband Rufus, listened politely the first time he came calling, breaking beans all the while. As Irwin told the story in a 2008 interview with HistoryAccess.com, he described Eledge pulling a derringer out of her apron pocket and asking if he knew that it was. 

“I said, ‘That looks like a pistol.’ She said, ‘That’s right. I carry it for you people that come around trying to buy my people’s stuff.’”

It took time and the gift of photographs of her and her husband, but eventually the Eledges came around, the old soap stand in the smokehouse, the first of several items they sold.

‘Almost hoarding’

Irwin’s family settled in the late 18th Century in what would become Union County, and that longevity likely helped his dealings with the old-timers. The Irwins were displaced twice in his youth—first when the Tennessee Valley Authority built Norris Dam and flooded the property and later for the development of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. 

As a boy, Irwin’s natural curiosity and love of his home region got him started collecting long before he opened the museum. His first items were various tools from his grandfather and other older members of the family and their friends.

In fact, it was his maternal grandfather who advised him “to keep all these old things that belonged to our people and start a museum some day.” 

And that’s just what he did, first filling a room in his house and later moving the growing collection into the garage. 

His children grew up thinking the garage was for anything other than protecting the vehicle.

“It was almost like hoarding,” Meyer says with a laugh. “We thought everybody was like that! One time my sister and I had a sleep-over at somebody else’s house. We came back and said, ‘They park their car in there!’”

“We roller-skated around in that garage,” she said.

When the garage was too full, Irwin threw a tarp over part of the collection outside. And that’s when his wife, Elizabeth, drew a line. “You’ve got to do something,” she told him, Meyer recalls. And he did.

He located a small log building, marked all the logs, dismantled it, reassembled it on his property in Norris, and moved the collection in, eventually charging visitors 50 cents to see what he’d found.

“We had an old service station bell,” Meyer recalls, a pressure-sensitive hose stretched across the drive that triggered a bell when a car drove over it. “We’d hear the bell and one of us would come out and lead them through and tell them about everything.”

That was in 1969. Fifty years later, Irwin has written seven books on Appalachian history and its people and received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” There are more stories in dozens of buildings on 63 acres than can be told. Hand-written cards next to each exhibit tell some of the stories: where the objects came from, how old they are, who found them, how they were used. 

The items from my property come from the Civil War era. General James Longstreet’s troops camped on the land in the winter of 1863-64, and one of his subordinate, General Lafayette McLaws, was headquartered in Hayslope, the now 234-year-old home I own. 

In the Museum of Appalachia exhibit, there are bullets and buttons, spoons and spectacles, dice and wedding bands among the items dropped by soldiers camped on the hills. From around Hayslope, Irwin’s friend Gene Purcell dug up bottles—whiskey bottles, ginger beer bottles, a celery compound bottle. 

Ordinary people, fighting an extraordinary war, leaving behind the everyday items they used.

I’m always awed by a sense of history whenever I walk on a particular piece of land, pondering the people who’d walked these same spots centuries or even millennia before. And I wondered for a bit as we walked the museum property: Why, growing up so close to this place, had I’d never been to visit? I wondered that out loud over lunch—if I don’t mention it again, the museum’s cafe is indescribably delicious—and one of my traveling companions solved the mystery. To my parents, it was a museum of everyday life.

The museum’s Hall of Fame contains tributes to old-time country music stars like Uncle Dave Macon, the Carter Family, and Bill Monroe. These were the soundtrack of my childhood. Displays of banjos, fiddles, and guitars were plucked straight out of my Saturday nights, when my dad played his stand-up bass for the weekly dance broadcast live on the radio from the top floor of Bradley’s Pro Hardware.

Plows, wagons, tools, barrels—these were in every barn or on every back porch. Here in Norris, though, they come with the stories of the people who used them, forgotten by many, even those of us who grew up in such close proximity.

“Most of this comes from within 200 miles or so around here,” Elaine Meyer says. “It’s not necessarily the best of the best, but John Rice brought it here because of what it meant.”

“We all know all these people,” she says. And it’s not just because they traveled into the hollers to find them but because they are the people of Appalachia.

I know them, too. They just have different names and faces in my memories.

“My philosophy is, an artifact becomes much more interesting if it’s connected to the story of human beings, to how people used it,” Irwin said in that 2008 interview. “I make a great effort at the museum to make that connection, and I must say, I get many a compliment about that approach. If you disconnect the item from the story, I think it destroys the value of the item.”

So John Rice Irwin collected the artifacts of the mountain culture. His four acres in Norris grew to more than 60, and the museum’s property now looks like an Appalachian pioneer village. Homes range from Tom Cassidy’s tiny one-room cabin (with his faded photo of country music star Kitty Wells still in the wall) to the stately Peters Homestead House, built in Luttrell around 1840. There’s a rare cantilever barn, blacksmith shops, corn cribs, smokehouses, a school, a church, and the Hagoods’ harness shop, each building brought to the property in the same meticulous manner: marking, dismantling, reassembly.

The cabins, shops, and barns are stocked with the normal items of life in the hills and mountains of Appalachia, “as though the family has just left to cultivate their fields, or go to Sunday meeting,” the museum says on its tour map.

Inside the two large display buildings and a third smaller one are a recreated general store, doctor’s office, and dentist’s office, a highly-decorated, horse-drawn hearse, and painstakingly-woven Native American baskets, along with exhibits about the famous native sons of Appalachia, like Medal of Honor winner Sergeant Alvin York and cooper Alex Stewart.

Peacocks with their iridescent blue necks and heads strut the property, hopping onto the arms of a cane mill or sitting on the fences, squawking their presence loudly and often. Chickens, horses, cattle, sheep, and goats live in the fields. Cats patrol the grounds and inside the gift shop. The cafe uses herbs and vegetables grown in the gardens. 

The cafe. I could sing the praises of that little restaurant all day and then some. The pole beans are good enough to make me want to drive up from Atlanta just for another mess of them. I can’t say I’ve enjoyed a homestyle meal that much since, well, since the actual home meals I had with my family. Yes, it’s that good, and the place is hopping at lunch time with locals as well as museum visitors.

These days, with Irwin retired from active work at the museum, the acreage, the buildings, and the artifacts have nearly reached their limits.

“I say no, we’re not adding any more,” Meyer says, noting that sometimes she sees the exceptional item. “But I just took in this beautiful mourning dress.”

“We’re now more into preservation than acquisition,” she said. “John Rice didn’t have a lot of money, so he didn’t think about that part very much.”

The museum has come a long way from the 50 cent tour. It’s now a not-for-profit organization and is an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institute.

Even though Irwin, now 88, isn’t seen much around the wonderland he created anymore, his family is. Grandchildren work at the museum, and great-grandchildren roam the grounds. And the founder himself makes occasional appearances, most recently at a fundraiser in early May.

Special events are a part of life at the museum, too. Although they stopped producing the annual Tennessee Fall Homecoming because the event had grown too large for the small staff to handle, other events pop up throughout the year. There’s the Great Appalachian Fiddler’s Convention in June, the Independence Day Anvil Shoot in July, sheep shearing days, barn dances, and Candlelight Christmas in December. The grounds frequently echo with the sounds of old-timey music or the shouts of children on a school trip, as well as the inescapable calls of the peacocks. 

All of that sets the scene for the Eledges’ soap stand, the Hagoods’ leather shop, Dove’s gristmill, the Clemonses cabin, the Native peoples’ handiwork, and the ringing melodies of banjos and fiddles.

And the stories. We mustn’t forget the stories, the tales of lives still breathing, not forgotten, here at the Museum of Appalachia.

Get there

• The Museum of Appalachia is at 2819 Andersonville Highway, Clinton, Tennessee, 16 miles north of Knoxville.
• The museum is open seven days a week except Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day. Hours of operation vary seasonally, either 9 a.m.-5 p.m. or 9 a.m.-6 p.m.
• Admission prices are $18 for ages 18-64; $15 for 65+; $10 for ages 13-17; $6 for children ages 5-12, and younger children free with parent. A family rate for two adults and children is $42, while the facility also has a group rate. The museum offers AAA and military discounts. Admission may be higher during special events.
• Visit museumofappalachia.org for additional information.