Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 26, 1994 TAG: 9406300001
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The answer, come Saturday, is lots of hands-on activities, presentations of life in a pre-Civil War settlement and acres of wilderness and riverbanks to explore.
Kids will enjoy helping assemble furniture, petting the animals, gathering vegetables from the garden or playing children's games during lunch at the schoolhouse. Adults also can try blacksmithing, weaving on an antique loom, firemaking, cooking over an open hearth and tomahawk throwing.
Visitors leave the 20th century and their cars at the parking lot and walk to the Blue Ridge Settlement - Explore's collection of reassembled historic buildings. There, they enter the colonial period of 1790 to 1860.
Touring the settlement takes about two hours, but visitors who bring picnic lunches or walk the easy-to-moderate hiking trails can make a day of it.
Explore is a participatory experience, and visitors can share in many of the activities the interpreters are doing. Since the settlement aims to be as self-sufficient as possible, much of the work being done - farming, maintenance, building - will actually be used at Explore.
Interpreters are in period dress, and visitors will come upon them working the fields, cooking in the farmhouse, crafting nails at the blacksmith forge. These interpreters will not be in character, however, so they will be able to answer questions and compare modern methods to the ways of frontier times.
What visitors will see:
The Hofauger farmstead is the centerpiece of the settlement, with two interpreters - male and female - doing farmwork. Visitors can linger on the front porch while a roaming musician, Curley Ennis, plays the dulcimer, or they can check out the barnyard.
They also can pick vegetables in the garden outside the back door and help prepare them in the kitchen, where farmers cook over an open hearth. Upstairs is a loom for weaving.
In the vegetable garden grow plants from heirloom seeds, which are grown to preserve rare plants that aren't used much anymore because they don't produce as much as newer strains. One of the ways Explore functions as a museum is in preservation of heirloom seeds and minor-breed animals that were popular in colonial times.
Around the farm are old-time varieties of apple and pear trees donated to Explore, and the pigs, chickens and lone cow are rare species.
A flock of Dominique chickens runs loose around the farmstead, a species with fewer than 800 left in the world, said Ginny Laubinger, director of education. Because they aren't prolific egg-layers and don't yield much meat, they're no longer popular with farmers, but they're very hardy and "great bug catchers." Explore is one of a network of historical museums keeping the species going, as it does with the two pigs in the barn.
The Hofauger house also has an outbuilding that will function as a root cellar and house a cooper and cobbler shop for barrel and shoe making. Pastures and a woodlands wetland area sit in front of the farm, and a springhouse will be built this summer. The antique chestnut railing that fences in the pasture was rescued from a bonfire in West Virginia.
The Houtz barn, the bigger of two barns in the settlement, is one of the first buildings a visitor sees when entering the settlement. It's a massive, three-story Pennsylvania German bank barn where the process of threshing and storing crops will be explained.
Farm wagons, tools and other equipment are on display, and an interpreter will be making furniture here. The barn is built on a bank, so from the front it appears to be two stories and from the back, three. Horses will be kept on the lower level, crops above.
Throughout the Blue Ridge settlement, rock outlines will indicate where buildings that Explore has acquired but not yet raised will go. The Brugh Tavern, which will go next to the barn, is one of the many buildings Explore has either in storage or hopes to move from their original locations. An interpreter will explain the history and functions of the barn and the tavern.
A primitive store run by New Mountain Mercantile will sell candlestick holders, baskets and bowls made at Explore, dried herbs and beans, shell necklaces made by the Native American interpreter and nails made by the blacksmith. Twentieth-century commercialism creeps in a bit here, with the requisite Explore T-shirts also available.
A circa-1860 Franklin County schoolhouse that was used until 1933 has been reassembled at the settlement and child volunteers will "play school" with a schoolteacher-interpreter while visitors are there. Visitors can sit down on the hard wooden benches that served as desks and observe pre-Civil War school life, and children can try the blackboard or play traditional games during lunch.
"As opposed to the fancified version, we're trying to find out what it was really like," said Mary Lou Richardson, who will don a teacher's dress and explain school life, which she has been researching recently.
"One thing I found out was that people did a lot of their studying out loud, so the schoolroom could be really noisy. My challenge is to find out what the day looked like."
A French and Indian War-era interpreter will have an open-faced cabin that will display clothing and equipment typical of the 1700s. Interpreter Scott Sarver will demonstrate fire making with flint and steel, primitive cooking techniques and flintlock rifles. He also will have a tomahawk-throwing - a show of skill - set up by the school that visitors can try.
A Native American setting along the river - separate from the settlement - will instruct visitors on local life before and right after Europeans arrived. The interpreter there, Dan Abbott, will be building a traditional Native American lodge throughout the summer, and members of various tribes from the region will visit at different times.
There are about seven miles of hiking trails within 300 acres in and around the settlement. Visitors can walk one of them for free, the American Foresters trail that describes logging and forestry techniques of the era with horses and plows. Stephen Miller and his horses will demonstrate that work.
The other trails go through or near the settlement, and visitors must pay the entrance fee to use them, but naturalist Jim Baldwin said he expects to get repeat visitors interested in wildlife viewing. The park is located on the Roanoke River Water Gap, a geological area where the river leaves the Blue Ridge region and enters Piedmont.
The hiking trail system eventually will link with the Blue Ridge Parkway spur that will be built to go to Explore and include another 15 miles of trails, Baldwin said.
Throughout the summer, work will continue and new construction undertaken. Depending on the time of day or time of year, visitors will see different activities going on. Explore has other buildings in storage and the footprints of some of them are outlined in stone in the settlement. An interpreter describing early black history is planned.
"It keeps evolving," Richardson said. "It will be a lot different next year than this year."
by CNB