{"id":4021,"date":"2013-11-10T08:00:15","date_gmt":"2013-11-10T08:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/janetgover.com\/?p=4021"},"modified":"2013-11-10T08:00:15","modified_gmt":"2013-11-10T08:00:15","slug":"stories-within-stories-within-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnhocking.net\/jg2025demo1\/history\/stories-within-stories-within-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"Stories within stories \u2026 within stories."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>
The museum boasts a large collection of buildings – rescued from their original locations and rebuilt.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

Museums are not about rare and fabulous objects safely locked behind protective glass.\u00a0 At least the good ones aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Museums should be about people and the lives they lived.<\/p>\n

Museums should tell stories.<\/p>\n

And never have I found more stories in a single place than at the fabulous Museum of Appalachia <\/a>in Tennessee.<\/p>\n

The place is full of stories. The place is a story itself.<\/p>\n

In 1967, John Rice Irwin, a cultural historian \u2013 began collecting\u00a0\u00a0 stuff \u2013old stuff. And with that stuff, he collected stories of his native Tennessee. He wrote those stories down \u2013 so they would never be forgotten\u2026<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s one of them –\u00a0the story of Raymond Fairchild\u2019s Jawbone Fiddle \u2013 in his own words.<\/p>\n

“Old Man Willis Harris gave me that mule when I was about seven years old and I named him Siron Slick.<\/em><\/p>\n

I plowed him to raise our crops and rode him. He made a living for us. Him and an old cow.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The jawbone fiddle is signed by musicians who played it – or performed with it’s owner<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One day old Siron just up and died. A lot of people don\u2019t understand how you can get so close to an old mule like that.<\/em><\/p>\n

We buried him and I guess it was several years before I went back and I found that varmints and dogs had dug up Siron\u2019s bones. I saw his old skull lying there and it made me kinda sad and I took it home.<\/em><\/p>\n

I was talking to a friend of mine about old Siron Slick\u2026 and he said if you thought that much of him, bring that old jawbone over and I\u2019ll make something out of it for you.<\/em><\/p>\n

I run into him a year or so later and he said I\u2019ve got your jawbone fixed.<\/em><\/p>\n

He\u2019d built a pretty fiddle sort of inside old Siron\u2019s jawbones. And I swear it\u2019s not a bad sounding fiddle. He liked it so much that he wouldn\u2019t let me have it. Said I\u2019d have to wait \u2018til after he died. Well, he kept it till he died and not long after his wife called me and told me to come and get my fiddle.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Raymond later donated that fiddle to John Rice Irwin and the museum he founded.<\/p>\n

The Museum of Appalachia is a collection of buildings and stuff \u2013 that tells the story of life in the Appalachian mountains and of the people who lived there. It\u2019s a walk through the past.<\/p>\n

Sometime that past isn\u2019t as far back as one might think \u2013 Tom Cassidy lived in this cabin lined with cardboard to keep out the cold until his death in 1989. That\u2019s not so long ago.<\/p>\n

\"It's<\/a>
Cassidy once said : “I’ve got a cot, a chair, a stove for heat and cooking, a frying pan, a bean pot and old dresser, my fiddle and my pistol. What more does a man need?”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

Irwin hand wrote labels for the objects he collected \u2013 and those labels tell their stories..<\/p>\n

A cradle where Louise Stooksbury (born 1858) rocked her fifteen children.<\/p>\n

A toy wooden wagon owned Elsie Joe Henderson \u2013 the daughter of a judge \u2013 made for her by the family’s black caretaker, old Jack Tate.<\/p>\n

George Burkhart and his wife Sapphira, who made their home in the hollow truck on a tree and raised six children there \u2013 including three sons who were all good blacksmiths.<\/p>\n

Some of the stories were straight from the horse\u2019s mouth as it were \u2013 told by older people who remembered. Others were passed on by children or grandchildren\u2026 but they are the true folk history of Appalachia and it\u2019s people.<\/p>\n

People like Dr Andrew Jackson Osborne, who\u00a0was born in 1869.<\/p>\n

\"In<\/a>
Dr William Robinette (on the left) taught doctorin’ to his nephew Andy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

People would walk for miles to visit his medicine house and he would also travel on horseback to see patients\u00a0long distances\u00a0away. It was said he often slept on that horse\u2019s back. When he reached the medicine house, the horse would nudge the door to make enough noise to wake the doc.<\/p>\n

He never charged his patients \u2013 but those who could pay something, did.<\/p>\n

He was particularly distressed by the infant mortality rates in the mountains \u2013 and tragically ten of his own children died at birth or in early infancy.<\/p>\n

Doc Osborne ministered to the people all his life and was poor all his life. When he died in April 1937 the Rev Frank Phipps had to find a suit for him to be buried in.<\/p>\n

\"Inside<\/a>
Inside the Doc’s medicine house – in reality a tiny shack. Most of these items are the ones he used.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Tucked away in a corner of the main museum building, I found The Murder Bench from War Creek church. What a story it had to tell.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A burn mark that hides a bloody story – lives lost because of a hog.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

Apparently a feud started when a wandering hog destroyed the mash at a neighbours whiskey still. That feud claimed several lives. \u00a0One of the victims was ambushed outside a church. Mortally wounded, he was carried inside to die on this bench. Even after the dispute was ended, the stain left by his blood on the end of the bench was too great a reminder of the bloody feud \u2013 and churchgoers tried to burn it away. But that only left a burn mark as an equally strong reminder of old animosities.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what this museum is all about \u2013 it\u2019s a story of the people. Many of these people never had a job as we understand it. They grew corn and raised pigs to feed their families. Women wove fabric for clothes. People built their own homes. And communities shared the results of their labours.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The school – complete with outhouse. The last class doesn’t seem that very long ago… and there is a label with the names of all these children.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"The<\/a>
The cabins still look much as they did when the last inhabitants moved to better homes.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Hymns<\/a>
Hymns are still sometimes sung in the old chapel.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The faces all have stories to tell.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But perhaps the most amazing story of all is that all this arises from one man\u2019s love of his people and his history.\u00a0 Thank you John Rice Irwin \u2013 you have given us a treasure equal to any of the shiny gold trinkets I have seen in other museums.<\/p>\n

More on my US trip next week – and there’ll be more history involved and a bear hunt in the Great Smoky National Park.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Museums are not about rare and fabulous objects safely locked behind protective glass.\u00a0 At least the good ones aren\u2019t. Museums should be about people and the lives they lived. Museums should…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-my-travels"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnhocking.net\/jg2025demo1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnhocking.net\/jg2025demo1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnhocking.net\/jg2025demo1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnhocking.net\/jg2025demo1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnhocking.net\/jg2025demo1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/johnhocking.net\/jg2025demo1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4021\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnhocking.net\/jg2025demo1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnhocking.net\/jg2025demo1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnhocking.net\/jg2025demo1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}