ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 7, 1996 TAG: 9604050029
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFF STURGEON STAFF WRITER
FOR much of the past 2,000 years, Indians lived in wigwams in what is now Southeast Roanoke. But until now, we knew little about them.
Explore Park is fixing that by recreating a part of the village with costumed interpreters who have lashed together the beginnings of an authentic wigwam for the new season, which began Saturday.
In another part of the woods, a frontier explorer has erected a crude cabin and is designing a fortress against Indian attacks. A colonial farmer has planted a garden. These new exhibits took shape while the 1,300-acre living history park and hiking area in Roanoke County was closed this winter.
Explore Park started more than a half-dozen new features during its five-month break. Many of the projects have been talked about for years as a way of fulfilling the park's mission to showcase lifestyles in Virginia's frontier and pre-frontier days. Now, the seeds of earlier planning efforts are coming to fruition.
Most of the projects are stunningly and - gloriously, park officials believe - incomplete.
"This is a construction year," said General Manager Chet Simmons. He doesn't think anyone will mind the dust.
Indeed, if the wigwam were finished, it would be difficult to inspect the deer-skin lace used to bind the white oak saplings which make up the lodge's inner frame. As it is, visitors can be there when mats of cattail leaf and bark are added later this spring to enclose the structure. The replica of an Eastern Woodland Indian village will include three wigwams and a larger longhouse, based on communities that existed until about 1650.
"Construction is going to continue right on through the season as a means of demonstrating how these things were done," said interpreter Daniel "Firehawk" Abbott.
On a recent morning, a plume of smoke wafted over the new Indian village, which is in a clearing that overlooks the Roanoke River. Abbott, a stern-speaking descendant of the Nanticoke-Choptank tribe who wears a shark tooth necklace, grunted a greeting to a visitor.
He showed off his bone-handled knives with stone blades as sharp as razors. He said he would prefer them to anything he could buy at an outdoor gear shop. Visitors will be allowed to swing his handmade ax and to try to start a fire without a match, but for the most part the village is a place to watch and absorb.
This day, Abbott issued himself a challenge. In about two minutes, he said, he would make a instrument sharp enough to slit animal skin. He retrieved a hunk of flint the shape of a calzone from its hiding place on the roof of a work shelter. Using first rock and then bone strikers, he split off a sharp flake of stone which he then used to trim off a strip of buffalo hide to produce a lace. The device would have a variety of other uses, he said.
"If I wanted a scalpel, I have one here," he said.
Moving 100 years forward in time, Explore Park exhibitors will also demonstrate the ways of frontier explorers who reached these parts of Virginia in about 1750.
A tent was the first shelter built; visitors could have seen that last year. But when the frontiersman tired of tent life, they built open-faced cabins like the one that now stands in the park.
When the frontiersmen moved on, small farmers occupied their cabins, often starting vegetable gardens.
The next progression in the frontier lifestyle, the building a fort, is on schedule to begin before the end of the current season. The fort will consist of a house surrounded by a palisade and cabins.
The timber will come from trees uprooted by another project: the 1.5-mile Roanoke River Parkway, a two-lane road that will connect the Blue Ridge Parkway and Explore Park in 1997.
The new road, a branch of the Blue Ridge Parkway, will bridge two canyons and lead to three overlooks. Funds will be sought from the federal government to build a visitor center along its route.
Where the spur enters Explore Park, the blueprint calls for a welcome center and a public restaurant inside the Brugh Tavern, a building erected in 1780 or so that was plucked from a pasture near Fincastle and is being reconstructed. It will take at least another year to finish those projects.
But another historic reconstruction is farther along. Mountain Union Church, a Botetourt County landmark that dates to 1880, is scheduled to open in September as a site for non-denominational services, weddings, lectures and other events.
Explore Park visitors have in attraction's first two years spent the most time in a small 1830s settlement with a blacksmith shop, school and household where meals simmer over an open fire. The woods within the Blue Ridge Settlement, as it is called, may seen thicker to return visitors this year. The park received a donation of 100 trees which were planted there.
As in past years, the blacksmith will melt and shape implements, but this year will work alongside a new wheelwright's shop for the making and repair of wagon wheels.
The place where the wheelwright shop operates used to be lined with handcrafted items made in Explore Park, but this year those looking for gifts will find them in the former New Mountain Mercantile gift shop. The store was taken over by the park during the off season and renamed Rawanoke Trading Co.
Adjacent to the store is a large gravel parking lot, which will soon be put to a higher use.
In the parking lot, a construction crew will break ground before the end of the year on the proposed Hancock Education Center, which will provide a setting for interpretative programs and serve as a laboratory. The building's namesake is John W. Hancock Jr., the late founder of Roanoke Electric Steel Corp., which has pledged $400,000 to the project. Grand Piano and Furniture pledged $100,000 to the project, NationsBank $75,000 and Bell Atlantic $36,000, said Rupert Cutler, the park's executive director.
Park officials expect 41,000 visitors in the current season that runs through October, twice last year's total.
They have expanded the event calendar to include festival-style events, the first of which is a reeneactment of battles between the British Redcoats and Colonial Patriots this weekend.
The event will be the first situated on a Rutrough Road farm owned by Explore Park, the former site of a red wolf breeding program. The program was eliminated over the winter due to a budget crunch at Mill Mountain Zoo.
And for those who prefer the isolation of the undisturbed woods, Explore's leaders this season plan to set up a picnic area and recommend fishing spots on the bank of the Roanoke River. They are scouting about for a spot for launching canoes and kayaks.
"It's a very rich fishing stream," Cutler said. "This is the spawning run from for the striped bass from Smith Mountain Lake. There's walleye. There's black bass. There are trout that come down the river."
LENGTH: Long : 131 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: WAYNE DEEL/Staff. 1. (From left) Bill Berry, Cory Ageeby CNBand Larry Brown set one of the last floor joists in the Mount Union
Church reconstruction project at Explore. The men work for Brown
Contruction Co. of Bedford. The church originally was built in the
late 1800s in Botetourt County; its reopening is scheduled for
September, and non-denominational services, weddings, lectures and
other events are planned there. 2. Native American Daniel "Firehawk"
Abbott (left) demonstrates how Indians wove saplings to make a round
lodge. 3. Scott Sarver (above, left) and John La Rosa dress in
period costumes in a half-face cabin in the new colonial-planter
exhibit at the Explore Park. color. Graphic: Map. color. Chart.
color.