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CITYVIEWMAG.COM JULY AUGUST 2015
NONPROFIT SPOTLIGHT
Mountain Roots :
Mountain Roots :
The Museum
The Museum
of Appalachia
of Appalachia
Story by Mark Spurlock
“WHEN ALEX HALEY used to be here, it was remark-
able how busy we were and how often celebrities would show up,” says Elaine Irwin Meyer, as she sits by a dying fire in the “farm-to-table café” at the Museum of Appalachia in Clinton. Meyer is the museum’s president and the daughter of its founder, John Rice Irwin.
“Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones...,” she says, noting some well-known names between sips of her coffee, “Growing up around
all that, I didn’t think the level of activity and famous guests were unusual.”
Today, the museum—while still at- tracting 100,000 annual visitors to an especially family-accessible mix of roam- able outdoors and rustic indoors—is a more tranquil place most of the time. When Meyer’s now 84-year-old father opened the museum in 1969, it was self- sustaining, but she says that in 2001, after the celebrities dwindled, it reorganized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Because of
its size (more than 50 buildings on 63 sprawling acres) and expansive holdings
of mountain cultural artifacts, keeping the museum going is a challenge finan- cially and for the staff. “My father was a collector,” says Meyer, “but now we have to focus on maintaining his collection rather than adding to it—or things will start to fall into neglect.”
She is serious: “If we were eating here today and it was raining, we’d have to bring out a bucket or two because of the leaks.” The museum’s entrance building needs a new roof.
Ask a young person today who Haley was and he or she will in all likelihood not know. Rather than Kunta Kinte, LeVar Burton is more recognizable
from Reading Rainbow or as Lieutenant Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Roots are Jimmy Fallon’s house band. But when the miniseries Roots premiered almost 40 years ago— only eight years after the Museum of Appalachia’s opening—it was a transfor- mative television and national event that has never been surpassed in its popular impact. According to Nielsen, 85 percent
of all American households with televi- sion sets watched at least part of Roots. Nationally, tracing one’s genealogy became popular—at around the same
time the Foxfire book series about Appalachian ways was also growing in popularity. That’s the kind of enthu- siasm finding out about one’s cultural and family history can bring out in anyone—black or white.
Meyer believes that instinctive long- ing to understand where we come from is the reason her museum exists and
is necessary, still, in a generation that looks to the past less than its baby- boomer parents once did: “Schools aren’t teaching as much local history, and, as a result, kids miss developing that yearning to connect with their own ancestors,” she says. “But they need to learn about their roots, even if not from the Museum of Appalachia. They will have a greater appreciation of who they are when they understand the hard work, integrity, and ingenuity that went into making them.”