By Bill King
Jean and I were ready for a few days of hassle-free R-and-R last week. Sunday afternoon, right after church, we headed out toward the beautiful Appalachian Mountains of Eastern Tennessee. Rather than driving through the wonderfully busy city of Atlanta during the Monday morning rush hour, we decided to leave on Sunday when there would be less traffic. Right? Much to our surprise, when we arrived in downtown Atlanta, we discovered something strange. It seemed that about half of the population of the Southeast had the same idea we did. In case you are thinking that we hit an Atlanta traffic jam, you would be wrong. We hit two of them! The first one was caused by a wreck. The second was caused by, well, I still don’t know what caused the second one. We thought we might come back home by way of Montana in order to totally avoid any more traffic snarls.
We finally made it to Dillard, Georgia, where we stopped for the night before heading on up to Tennessee the next day. Before we left Georgia, we decided to visit The Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center, located on a mountainside next door to Rock Mountain State Park.
To get to The Foxfire Museum, you go up the mountain on a nice-paved road that turns into a narrow paved road, that turns into a small dirt road, that turns into a smaller dirt road, that goes on up to the museum…that is unless a truck-and-trailer carrying a track hoe is stuck at the bottom of the hill and blocking the road. I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” We had a traffic jam on a dirt road, on the side of a mountain, and in the middle of the woods. It appeared that his trailer was too long to go up the steep hill without dragging. Three jams in two days might be more jams than even Smucker’s has!
Finally, someone from the museum arrived. She instructed us to follow her, and she would lead us up the rest of the mountain by a back entrance to the museum. A four-wheel drive pickup would have been nice, and perhaps Lewis and Clark would have been helpful, too! I prayed on the way up, and I prayed the other road would be unblocked by the time we headed back down. We eventually made it to the top, and boy, was I ever glad. No, I really wasn’t frightened by the back entrance road, but Jean and I were both delighted by what we found at the museum and heritage center.
We enjoyed hiking a trail up the hillside on a beautiful fall day. All along the trail, we saw 20 historic log buildings that helped us catch a glimpse of the Appalachian Mountain lifestyle from the early 19th century until the mid 20th century. There, we toured houses, a church, a school, a covered wagon shed, a blacksmith shop, and more. Best of all, there were craftsmen there who demonstrated how the people performed such skills as weaving and cooking on a wood-burning stove. We even sampled some of their delicious homemade vegetable soup and freshly baked pumpkin bread. We washed it all down with apple cider. My favorite stop of the day was at the music shop. There, we listened to music played on a dulcimer made from a wooden cigar box, a guitar made from a tin pie plate, and a canjo made from a tin can. You can even attend a workshop and make your own instrument from a cigar box…and you don’t even have to smoke the cigars! I’m definitely going back!
