The Macon County Historical Museum has opened its doors again and will soon be getting a new exhibit.
Just a few weeks after receiving permission to reopen under the state’s Phase 2.5 social distancing guidelines, the museum is planning to unveil an artifact too large to fit inside its building.
“Back here in the back end of the garden between the two buildings, we just got the foundation in for a little one-room log cabin,” said director/curator Robert Shook. “It’s like an 1860 pioneer log cabin, and we’ll be moving it in soon. We’re moving it off of a lot south of town, and we’re going to be rebuilding it back here.”
Just behind the small garden beside the museum, visitors will have the chance to see an actual structure built near Franklin during the Civil War era. Thanks to the late Wayne Yonce, a Macon County Historical Society member and friend of the museum who sold the cabin to the museum, visitors will be able to examine a structure that was originally used as a smokehouse.
Upon reconstruction of the cabin in October, Shook hopes to allow visitors to see what the interior of the structure might have looked like.
“Since we’ll be putting things in it, we’ll probably put on a Plexiglas door so you can walk up and look in it,” said Shook. “It’s so small you can see everything in it. This garden and Rankin Square are used a lot for photographs of proms, weddings and things like that, so for that you can stand on the porch of an old 1800s log cabin.”
While many 19th-century structures still exist in Western North Carolina, the one Shook plans to display will give museum visitors an idea of how people lived in the 1800s, but the structure is not the museum’s only new artifact this fall. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced the museum to shut down earlier this year, it gave Shook a chance to do some spring cleaning in the storage room, and the search yielded some documents that Shook had never seen before.
“Most of our big items and artifacts are either out or have been out and we kind of have a handle on them, but a lot of the documents and things [were not],” said Shook. “I found some Cherokee deeds from Henry Addington. They were the originals that still had the red wax stamp on them. He was a major landowner in North Carolina. Just after Macon County opened land sales up in 1820, he probably owned 10,000 acres at any given time.”
Since reopening in early September, the museum has drawn larger-than-usual crowds of people eager to get out of the house as the state slowly eases social distancing guidelines, allowing the museum to begin recouping from its six-month hiatus.
“There have always been several visitors in town all summer long, but I think they just wanted a place to come,” said Shook. “The folks that have summer homes here I’m sure are in the same boat, but it’s been kind of like it was before everything happened.”