Day 2: Museum of Appalachia and Traveling to the Cabin

Today we went to the museum of Appalachia. After that, we had a very good lunch at the restaurant in the museum. I had a pork loin with sweet potato casserole, mandarin orange salad and corn bread. For dessert, we had wedding cake! My perception of the Appalachia was that it would be a mountain area town that would be in a rural area with not a lot of resources. Previously, I didn’t have a lot of knowledge of Appalachia. What stood out to me at the Appalachia Museum was all of the log cabins that we were able to tour through and all of the artifacts that we were able to see. We saw jail cells, churches, schoolhouses, animals, arrow heads, coffin examples of what they used to be like, examples of what they used to wear to funerals, a hearse, and so much more. What makes this culture unique is how well they treated each other. In order to make everything work, they all had to work well together and be apart of a team. They also had to work very hard for everything that they had. For example, in the General Bunch House, he talked about how they had twelve children and they only had two rooms to raise them in. They would walk twelve miles just for a bag of salt. I couldn’t imagine walking that far just for salt as that would take so long. My highlight that I would take away from this experience is learning about how they made everything work for them. I think that it would have taken a lot of time to figure out the best way to preserve food and raise children and care for the animals etc when they didn’t have all the easy access to things that we have today. They also dealt with the harsh winters that come about in the mountains and they can have other problems like rockfall as well. However, they made it work and they seemed to enjoy the life that they lived, and it is a very close community that they all shared together.