50 years of Southern Hearth & Home -- From the 1880s to the 1930s
This exhibit was always a public favorite. It was based on artifacts acquired from
a small community of homes in the piney woods of Florida. They were:
one Creek home, one Black home, one White home, one mixed-blood
Creek/White home and one mixed-blood Creek/Black home.
All were related to one another and lived there for several generations.
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The old Glenwood Range,
1906, was the heart of the whole community. It replaced "fireplace cooking"
in Aunt Alice and Gladys' original stick and mud chimney. They acquired
the stove from a wealthy white woman for whom they did laundry and other
chores weekly. That woman built a larger kitchen with a hotel size range
and cast this one away. The curator grew up with this fine range and many
of these items in daily use. Crocks and iron pots, copper boilers and sad-irons--tools
of domestic terror, filled the kitchens of all in the ancient rural South--often,
still do...!
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new fangled 1920s ice-box & hand-cranked telephone
Hearty meals no more...
A long, long time ago....
Where once the exhibit stood, now only empty space.
In storage is where it all be these days...
An exhibit shell once filled with life and energy now wears a cloak
of emptiness. Loneliness peers out from the vacant space
where the public once peered in with "uhs, ahs, and I remember that."
Gone are the two lads warming their hands on a cold
winter's day. This exhibited generated more shared memories and snippets
of personal oral histories and revealing genealogical
information than all the "Cherokee princesses who never lived." It
was an active space that often received its own fan
mail, most importantly, it made real the shared lives and experiences
of Native Americans, Blacks and Whites in rural north
Florida during the last one and a half centuries.