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Travel Diaries: The Museum of Appalachia (Placeholder)

8/8/2016

19 Comments

 
Yesterday I spent several hours at the Museum of Appalachia in Clinton, Tennessee. I found this place to be intensely interesting and, frankly, at times surprisingly moving.  I'm not sure how much time I'll have to write over the next couple of weeks: I'm back home again from the last trip of the summer and we've got a lot to do as a family to transition to the school year. I wanted to put this post here as reminder of some of thoughts I had about Appalachia as I crossed the region several times this summer. I hope that I can circle back around and develop some of my thoughts at some point (no guarantees).

I became aware of the Museum of Appalachia through it's entry in Roadside America, which described the museum as having a "seemingly endless supply of oddities" including a wood burl devil's head and a Civil War-era perpetual motion machine. I would've enjoyed the museum just for those things, but the fact is that it is really much more than a collection of oddities. Many of the items in the museum (which sprawls across 65 acres and several buildings filled with artifacts) are attached directly to stories about the people connected to the material culture. The items (such as homemade crossbows, polka dotted furnishings, whittled toys, and unique musical instruments) and the narratives evoke peoples' lives and experiences in a way that I have never seen before in a museum, blending the personal and historical to create (in me, at least) the sense that I knew these folks. My own family history, flirting with the fringes of Appalachia, probably contributed to that sense of familiarity. This museum makes history both big and small at the same time, and gives a voice to the textures, rhythms, and trajectories of people, societies, and ways of life that don't get much play in the "big" narratives of history -- a remarkable achievement.

​For now, I'm just going to post some photos I took.
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Homemade crossbows appear in several places in the museum.
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This artifact and the associated stories really brought home to me the importance of preserving local color.
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A display of home-made banjos. The museum has what it claims may be the second-oldest banjo in the country, dating to 1833 (I think). Because of its association with bluegrass music, the banjo is often thought to be an indigenous American instrument. There are multiple racial elements to the introduction and spread of the banjo, however. I don't know much about it yet, but the banjo was apparently brought to the Americas by slaves from West Africa. Appalachia is largely white ("Scotch-Irish"), and I didn't see much mention of African Americans either in connection with musical traditions or any other aspects of Appalachian life.
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Asa Jackson's perpetual motion machine. Like so many other technological artifacts from Appalachia, it is largely carved from wood.
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Some carved toys. Many of the descriptions in the museum highlight the large sizes of families, making me wonder about infant/child mortality rates and the contributions of children to Appalachian subsistence economies.
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The tiny house occupied by Tom Cassidy until his death in 1989. Tom Cassidy was sitting on his porch playing the fiddle while the XB-70 was crusing at Mach 3 in the upper atmosphere. The furnishings in the house are still intact.
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There were millstones and grinding stones all over the place. Some of the millstones were composite, but many were one piece with a round hole in the center. This stack of stone cylinders made me wonder how the millstone holes were created -- did they use some kind of tubular drill? So far I've found no evidence of that online, and I'm guessing the stone cylinders are from cores taken for the purposes of mineral exploration. Any thoughts? One of the reasons I'm interested in this is because of the "fringe" claim that circular holes in hard stone (e.g., in ancient Egypt) could not have been created without some kind of advanced technology, despite the existence of copper tubes used in conjunction with sand to drill though granite.
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There was no story attached to this gun, unfortunately. I'm sure it was a good one.
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I bought some souvenirs to use in the triceratops head I'm working on.
19 Comments
Bob Jase
8/8/2016 09:19:20 am

Is it my imagination or is the perpetual motion machine not moving???

Reply
Andy White
8/8/2016 10:37:42 am

You are, indeed, a keen observer.

There are some good stories associated with this contraption, one (unverifiable, of course) of which is that it actually ran for a period of many days. Reportedly Jackson guarded the thing during the Civil War and would take pieces of the machine with him when he left so that no-one (i.e., the Yankess) would be able to get it to work if they found it.

The museum has a book with detailed plans and analysis, but it was out of my price range for my level of curiosity. Here is the author's web page about the book:

http://suncitydave.info/asawheel.htm

Reply
Jim
8/8/2016 01:11:06 pm

That perpetual motion machine is completely awesome, I hate to tell you this, but it's even more awesome than even your crow !

Jim
8/8/2016 01:13:30 pm

crap,,,,,,,even even more so !

Reply
Andy White
8/8/2016 01:16:08 pm

But wait until you see my perpetual motion crow. I'm hiding it in a cave to protect it from the Yankees.

Reply
Jim
8/8/2016 01:39:22 pm

Does it fly ?

Andy White
8/8/2016 03:18:10 pm

I could tell you, but . . .

RiverM
8/9/2016 07:18:39 am

It flies true North only, not magnetic.

Andy White
8/9/2016 08:15:57 am

Because of all the antimony.

Bob Jase
8/9/2016 09:12:25 am

The Red Sox can use all the help they can get.

Carl Feagans
8/9/2016 10:21:07 am

Ugh.. antimony. Those payments are killing me.

Jim
8/9/2016 02:18:56 pm

Did you really make this crow ? How do we know the Romans didn't make it ?

Killbuck
8/8/2016 08:00:56 pm

Looks like a fun place. I love regional museums, and even more, the collections room with the collection pieces they can't figure out how to display or explain.

Also, I'm very impressed by your sculpture. Reminds me of the work of my friend Clayton Bailey.

Good stuff!

Reply
AutumnalScholar
8/8/2016 09:02:39 pm

Regarding boring holes in millstones, the Roman's used coring bits very similar to modern ones.
See Gaitzsch 1980 Eiserne Ramis he Werkzeug, pg 35 for an intro to these.

Long story short, ancient tools were really not much different from the tools used today. If it works, don't fix it. . .

Reply
Jim
8/8/2016 09:39:29 pm

ssshhhh.,,,don't let Hutton see this, both him and Scott will descend upon Appalachia looking for more Roman boreholes !

Reply
Andy White
8/9/2016 08:19:51 am

Yeah, I have found no evidence so far that the millstone "eyes" were made with tubular drills that would have removed cylindrical cores. I'm guessing that the stack of stone cylinders in the photo are just cores from mineral exploration. Someone send me an interesting article on the history of drill core exploration. I haven't read it in detail yet, but it looks like hollow core drills were being used in the region in the late 1800's to probe to significant depths. Those would have produced a lot of core samples that would presumably have just been discarded on the spot.

Reply
RiverM
8/9/2016 07:23:07 am

Next time driving through TN and OH, this museum and the aviation museum are definite stops. Thanks for the great photos and your thoughts on innovative curiosities and Americana from days gone by.

Reply
Andy White
8/9/2016 08:22:50 am

Thanks. I wish every region had a museum dedicated to preserving something of its own historical, economic, and social fabric. I'd visit them all.

Reply
Carl Feagans
8/9/2016 10:26:22 am

Thanks for the photos and descriptions. I've always had a fondness for small, private museums.

Reply



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