The Kitchen

The Loom House

Weaving and Weaving Games

The Quiltmaker

Early Christmas Crafts

Historical Story Time

Historical Pastimes

Replica toys, early games, stories, and songs from the 1700s and 1800s help children to learn how children of earlier times enjoyed their leisure time.

Early Games

Children test their skills at such outside games as horseshoes, jump rope, and some Native American games from the 1700s and 1800s.

One Room Schoolhouse

The schoolmaster, dressed in period style dress, teaches reading, writing, and arithmetic.  Spelling bees, writing on chalk slates, writing with quill pens, and playing early recess games show children what a typical school day was like 150 years ago.

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Early Farm Life

Children enter the world of a nineteenth century farm child in this program.  Using authentic tools, children plow, rake, hoe, plant seeds, and build a scarecrow in our picturesque farm setting.  Sorry there are no animals, however. 

Colonial Home Crafts

Within the historic Lawrence Corley Log House, built around 1774, children learn about life in the Colonial era in the backcountry by seeing furniture, quilts, dishes, and eating utensils.  They see a spinning demonstration, use cotton cards, and a “knitty-knoddy,” after which they dip candles and take home the finished product.

Life in the “Big House”

The John Fox House, constructed around 1832, provides the

backdrop for this program.  Guides point out various everyday items in the antebellum era such as the bed warming pan, the spittoon, the chamber pot, the rope bed, and much, much more.  Children then return to an activities room and get to experiment with replica items that they have just seen.  Most children who experience this program can go into any museum house of the same time period and feel at home while being able to know how everyday objects were used. 

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The Kitchen

Everyone loves the kitchen, especially the John Fox kitchen from the nineteenth century.  After seeing the kitchen and learning how certain items were used, they proceed out into the kitchen yard and inspect all of the outbuildings used for preparing a meal.  Children even get to see a historic privy.  The activities in the yard include butter-churning, corncob shucking, using a coffee grinder, and much more.  Teachers and parents will be given a short list of food items needed to do this tour, which can be found at any grocery store.

The Loom House

Children go into a fully outfitted loom house with spinning wheels and a loom.  They are shown how these items are used.  Children get to experience the use of cotton cards, picking seeds out of cotton, and even weave on little individual lap looms.

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Weaving and Weaving Games

This is a fiber arts program for younger children.  The loom is explained and demonstrated in the museum loom house, after which the children engage in paper weaving, potholder weaving, and daisey loom weaving according to their abilities.  They end the program by playing related games to the sound of early weaving songs.

The Quiltmaker

This is a program in which children see quilts, learn about early quilt patterns, and the meanings behind the patterns.  A quilt story is read while the children design their own quilt patterns with paper and crayons. 

Early Christmas Crafts

This tour is given for only a few weeks in December.  The John Fox House circa 1832 is decorated with period decorations which the children are shown as they look through the house.  After the tour, the children make these same early decorations such as popcorn strings, pomanders, and gum drop trees which they are allowed to take back to the classroom.  This program is a most memorable Christmas experience!

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Historical Story Time

This program is offered in the summer.  Various classic stories as well as historical and Native American stories are read.