Everyday artifacts are lovingly preserved in quirky Museum of Appalachia

IF YOU GO

The Museum of Appalachia

2819 Andersonville Hwy., Clinton, Tenn., is 1 mile off I-75, exit 122, north of Knoxville. It is open 9 a.m.-5 p.m. daily, with extended hours some summer weekends. Admission is $18, $15 for military and age 65 and older, $10 ages 13-18; $6 ages 5-12, ages 4 and younger free. 1-865-494-7680, www.museumofappalachia.org

“Christmas in Old Appalachia,” held Dec. 1-24, will feature the village decorated not with sparkling lights but with plain pine cone ornaments, cedar, bittersweet, scraps of cloth and apples — the way the mountain people did.

The Museum of Appalachia is the best kind of museum. It hums with warmth and humor. Everything has a story. It’s the right size. It allows wandering. And it surprises. A glass eye! A hog kettle! And little handmade toys that will touch your heart.

With a collection amassed by one man, John Rice Irwin, it opened as a museum in 1969 and is now a nonprofit and affiliated with the prestigious Smithsonian Institution.

Here, historical cabins, barns, privy, loom house and blacksmith shop create the feel of a 19th-century farm and Appalachian village spread over 65 acres. There also is a “hall of fame” building, my favorite, stuffed with amazing things, each with a story behind it.

Elaine Irwin Meyer, the founder’s daughter and now president, says her favorite object is a crib made by her great-grandfather and used by 5 generations, including her own children.

In fact, the museum was started, she says, not as a deliberate venture but as the outpouring of her schoolteacher dad’s “hobby gone crazy” — collecting Appalachian artifacts. (John Rice Irwin is still alive and living in a retirement facility.)

“Really, the buildings came as an afterthought,” she says. “We had all this stuff piled in our garage growing up. It became so much that it grew out from the garage to the yard. He put a tarp on it, but my mom thought it was hideous and said we were going to get rid of it. Then he started collecting cabins to get his stuff out of the garage and have someplace to store it.”

After the museum opened, it became clear that because of John Irwin’s little hobby, precious artifacts and buildings evocative of fleeting, hard and joyful mountain life had been saved from the trash can or bulldozer.

“People love it once they get there and see what we are trying to do,” Meyer says. “No matter where they come from, they appreciate their ancestors more, the way they persevered.”

Here are some of my favorite parts:

Gol Cooper’s glass eye

Six-year-old Gol Cooper was bending down to tie a shoelace in 1910 when it snapped, flinging the pocket knife in his hand into his left eye. His dad had a glass eye made that he wore the rest of his life. The family donated the eye and pocket knife to the museum after Gol died.

Lord’s Prayer quilt

Dating from about the 1890s and made by “Granny Irwin,” this Victorian crazy quilt was used by the family only at Christmas. The quilt includes depictions of animals and familiar items like a fiddle, dog, chickens, butterflies. The Lord’s Prayer is embroidered in the center.