By Tom Netherland

Leroy Troy picks one from the barn during the Tennessee Fall Homecoming at The Museum of Appalachia.

On the doorstep of the Great Smoky Mountains rests the tiny town of Norris, Tenn., population not quite 1,500. Cars speed nearby along Interstate 75 at rates seemingly without compare in Norris. For those who exit the interstate in search of the Museum of Appalachia, they find what amounts to an oasis within which folks can ease off the gas and soak in the mostly bygone ways of folks throughout the southern Appalachian region.

“It reminds me of how I was raised on the farm,” says bluegrass legend Melvin Goins, “with all the molasses making and barns and all.” Goins spoke moments before performing “Pistol Packin’ Mama” and “Body And Soul” during the 2009 Tennessee Fall Homecoming that ran October 8-11. Staged each second full weekend in October on the grounds of the Museum of Appalachia, the event features Appalachian bluegrass, gospel, country, and old-time string band music. The 2009 event attracted folks from almost all fifty states as well as Japan and England. Performers seemed to enjoy the event and environs as much as the fans. “We’re thrilled to be here,” says Steve Gulley of Grasstowne. “This is God’s country, East Tennessee.”

Museum of Appalachia

After leaving the interstate and a short drive along a four-lane highway, there emerges the wonderfully rustic grounds of the Museum of Appalachia. Turn into its winding gravel drive. Fences crisscross on either side while passing by barns and ample shade trees. Park, walk a short ways, and see an immense gristmill to the left, the museum to the right, and in between what appears like a farm, circa 1900 or so. Welcome to back to the future East Tennessee style.

Founded in 1969 by John Rice Irwin, the Museum of Appalachia encompasses about thirty buildings on about sixty-three acres of land about twenty miles north of Knoxville, Tenn. Inside the main building and beyond, the museum contains several hundred thousand artifacts relative to the history of southern Appalachia. “With the Museum of Appalachia and each October with the Tennessee Fall Homecoming, we are trying to preserve a way of life for people of this region,” says the museum’s executive director Elaine Meyer, daughter of John Rice Irwin. “We are a museum, but unlike most museums, we are a living museum.”

A cornucopia of culture Appalachian-style on display throughout the year awaits visitors. More impressive, its layout of barns and log cabins and corn cribs along with its hay and pumpkins and corn stalks are not recreations and thus exclusively for show. The museum’s barns house barnyard animals from horses to sheep and pigs and even peacocks while its hay and grain and such feed them. So by visiting the Museum of Appalachia, whether each October for the Tennessee Fall Homecoming or at any other time during the year, visitors will experience a resonant taste of Appalachian life circa mid-nineteenth century and forth. There are even two moonshine stills, one of which was built by infamous moonshiner, the late Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton. “I saw Popcorn Sutton here one time,” says John Alvis, who plays in the Museum of Appalachia Band. “It looked like he’d done crawled out of a hollow log.”

For the curious who venture up a hill behind at least one log cabin that dots the museum’s fertile grounds, there’s an outhouse, a pristine two-hole privy, an indelible sight for generations of residents of Appalachia. Such a sight brought a wide grin to Leroy Troy, who gave a tug to his Pointer overalls. “I love it,” Troy says. “These old cabins, I like to go in ’em where I can think about how things used to be. My wife complains that we have only one bathroom, but golly, we’ve got two bedrooms and cable television.”
Food available on site during the homecoming includes such typical festival fare—funnel cakes and cotton candy and hot dogs and such. However, lines were much longer wherever cornbread and soup beans and blackberry, peach, and cherry cobbler were sold. “It’s pretty dang good,” Troy says between bites of a warm dish of blackberry cobbler.

Buildings include an extremely rare cantilever barn, jail cells circa 1874, a schoolhouse, Irwin’s Chapel Church circa 1840, a slave cabin, smokehouses, outhouses, and a gristmill circa 1790s. There’s even a log cabin that the parents of Mark Twain lived in up until just a few months before the famed author was born. “It reminds me of where I was born and raised with all the horses and mules and chickens,” Melvin Goins says. “They’ve brought back a lot of the old things.”

Look at the Tennessee Fall Homecoming as the embodiment in action of that which the museum is grounded upon. In addition to music on five stages, demonstrators include weavers, whittlers, spinners, cedar rail splitters, lye soap makers, and so on. From the barns to the cabins to the food that in decades past was probably served within those cabins to music that once was most likely played on the porches of those cabins, the festival offers a loving and vividly accurate look back. “It’s awesome,” says Alan Bibey of Grasstowne. “It reminds me of being back home. I grew up with stuff like this. I grew up with tobacco fields and going to the barn when I was five years old. Maybe a lot of these people wouldn’t go to this festival if it was only a bluegrass festival. You get a touch of Americana according to us, thirty to forty years ago. It’s everything I grew up around.”

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