Norris, Tenn. — On the porch of an 1840s log cabin, Tony Thomas and Gene Brewer are playing guitar and fiddle and singing a medley of Appalachian mountain music and old-timey gospel tunes.

"Life's Railway to Heaven," "The Sunny Side of Life," "I'll Fly Away," "Daddy Was an Old Time Preacher" and other familiar melodies attract a knot of visitors touring the Museum of Appalachia this warm summer morning.

William Schemmel/Special (ENLARGE)
Music is part of the daily routine at the Museum of Appalachia in Norris, Tenn., where Gene Brewer (left) and Tony Thomas strum and sing mountain and gospel music.
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IF YOU GO Getting there • The museum is just off I-75 North, about 230 miles from downtown Atlanta, about a four-hour drive. Take Exit 122 about 16 miles north of Knoxville and go east about a mile. About the museum • The Museum of Appalachia, P.O. Box 1189, Norris, TN 37828, 865-494-0514, web site. Open daylight hours daily. Adults $12.95, age 65-over $10, age 6-12 $5. Tennessee Fall Homecoming, this year Thursday through Sunday, is the museum's biggest yearly event. Adults 4-day ticket, $75, one-day $25, age 6-12, 4-day $15, $5 one-day. The museum has a gift shop and restaurant. While you're there • John Rice Irwin isn't the only Appalachian "pack rat." The Lenoir Museum, at nearby Norris Dam State Park, exhibits the late Will Lenoir's collection of Appalachian and other oddities, including animal traps, quilts, pottery and an 1826 Bavarian barrel organ with 44 moveable figures. On the shores of the TVA's Norris Lake, with a 265-foot-high dam, the park includes a 1798 gristmill, marina, pool, playgrounds, cabins and campgrounds. 865-426-7461, web site.

A lady from Indiana asks for "Amazing Grace." A man who recently lost his daughter requests "Precious Memories." He weeps as the hymn's bittersweet words wash over him and drift out onto the museum's vintage buildings and grounds.

Music is a part of everyday life at the museum, whose 250,000 Appalachian artifacts, two dozen buildings, livestock and vegetable gardens have been lovingly assembled over the past 45 years by John Rice Irwin, a former country schoolteacher who is credited with saving a large chunk of endangered Appalachian culture from extinction. This week, the museum is celebrating its Tennessee Fall Homecoming, Thursday through Sunday. Dozens of craftsmen and musicians fill the barns and dwellings.

In the Display Barn, visitors browse handcrafted axes, rifles, iron and copper kettles, locks and keys, barrels, baskets, horse-drawn hearses, spinning wheels, sheep shears, millstones, quilts, stagecoach horns, traps, bits, leather, carpentry, a country store and a post office.

Wimp Gibson carved "Old Abe" Lincoln in his stovepipe hat from a buckeye tree. Music-loving mountainfolk fashioned their instruments from whatever was at hand. Imagine "What A Friend We Have in Jesus" on the "Commode Seat Guitar," "Minnie Block's Gourd Fiddle," the "Cookie Box Banjo" and "Ukuweewee Bedpan Banjo."

Irwin, known to visitors as John Rice, can tell you the history of every single piece and loves nothing better.

"Rowe Martin, a lifelong bachelor, enjoyed sitting with his lady friends in that rocking chair built for two," he recounts. "He sold me the chair when he was in his 80s, and said he was too old to court anymore. Not long after that, he wanted it back because he reckoned he wasn't near as old as he thought."

The Appalachian Hall of Fame honors well-known figures and others who toiled away from the limelight. Sgt. Alvin York, a conscientious objector from Pall Mall, Tenn., became the most decorated hero of World War I and the subject of an Oscar-winning film with Gary Cooper. Cordell Hull, born in an east Tennessee log cabin, became a U.S. congressman, senator, President Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of state, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and "Father of the United Nations." The Carter Family and Roy Acuff popularized country music.

Among the lesser-known achievers, Alex Stewart, a coal miner Irwin wrote a book about, "was a master of 100 different crafts from well-digger to moonshiner, house-builder and the world's best cooper [barrel maker]. He went up to Indiana one time, and I asked him how it was. He said, 'Pshaw, the dogs in Tennessee are friendlier than the people in Indiana."

Around the 65-acre grounds are 1874 iron jail cells; a leather shop with complete tools and equipment used by Hobart Hagood of Persia, Tenn.; smokehouses; "Granny's Hen House & Chicken Lot;" blacksmith and wheelwright shops; a sawmill; a gristmill; the one-room Tater Valley Schoolhouse; Irwin's Chapel log church, with peacocks roosting on the roof; a cantilevered barn; a dairy barn; hog house and hog lot; a "two-hole" outhouse; a broom and rope house, all authentically furnished.

"The People's Building" houses huge concrete crosses and signs that coal miner Harrison Mayes put up around the country. ("Prepare to Meet God," "If You Go to Hell, It's Your Fault"). Mark Twain may have been conceived in his family's log cabin, moved here from Possum Trot, Tenn. Twain was born five months after his parents abandoned the cabin and moved to Missouri in 1835.

With his mane of snow-white hair and folksy wit, Irwin could pass for a modern-day Twain. Recalling his early interest in Appalachian culture, he says, "When I was a child, I spent time with all four of my grandparents. I loved them and wanted to have something that belonged to them. My Grandfather Rice gave me some of the tools that belonged to his great-grandfather, who was an early settler here. I remember he said, 'You oughta make a little museum of these old-timey things sometime.'

"If I can't think of a word, I think of my grandfather, who'd get so angry when he couldn't remember somebody's name, he'd say, 'Pshaw, I can't think of nothin' no more.'

"As a teenager, my brother David and I finished the upstairs in our house and put in quite a few old things. It gave me some connection, but I had no idea about making a hobby of collecting, but sometime later, I went to an auction over on the Clinch River, and they were bringing things from the old Miller homeplace. I was distantly related to them. They brought out this spinning wheel that had been in the Miller family for generations. I heard some of the buyers say they were from Indiana, and I thought it would be a shame if it left here for Indiana, so I bought it and some other pieces.

"I started looking around for other things. I was a schoolteacher at the time, making $2,400 a year and spending $2,600. My wife Elizabeth didn't think highly of that, she thought I ought to feed the kids first. My mother and father were in total agreement with her, and they had a meeting to discuss how they could slow me down and make me stop wasting money on these relics that were already worn out. Whatever plan they had, it didn't work. I'm still collecting."