'It's about people': Fair museum shows centuries of history

Gerald Henley's orange and brown camouflage hat hangs prominently in the Appalachian Fair Heritage Museum. Set against a painted landscape of fields and blue skies, it's surrounded by hundreds of Native American arrowheads, tools and small sculptures. The artifacts are a physical reflection of the late collector's digs along the Nolichucky and Holston rivers. Museum volunteers estimate the display is less than a third of the Jonesborough resident's collection."It has never been shown in public," said volunteer and museum organizer Dorothy Hamilton Hale. "It's always been on the premises of [his] property. It's unbelievable."The display is just one of many that takes Appalachian Fair visitors "back the way it was years ago," as Hale said. Nestled in a corner of the Gray fairgrounds, the museum showcases regional culture and history. That includes live demonstrations from quilters, blacksmiths and other artists. Fellow volunteer and museum organizer David Guinn said display relics are accurate to their time periods, like the country store that pulled its sign, counter and other parts straight from a real-life business near Greene County."We tried to either get the original equipment or some reasonable facsimile," he said. "The moonshine still over there is probably not a real moonshine still, but that's the way they work."The museum is a way to educate young people, Hale added — especially when the younger generation seems more disinterested in fairs. "I think, in order for people to be able to move ahead and come up and be able to adapt to all of this technology… they also need to be able to go back and see the stages of how this came about," she said. And while the history serves as an education, it's much more than that. It's a memory. Exhibits like the country store mirror Hale's own experience growing up in her father's Gray Station store. She said that he often bartered goods with people who couldn't afford to buy. When she started working in the fair museum years later, many people recognized her as his daughter. "They would say 'we need to thank you, because if it hadn't been for your father, we would have gone cold, we wouldn't have had shoes. We wouldn't have had a coat and we wouldn't have had food,'" she said. Hale first participated in the fair 75 years ago, when it was held at a Gray schoolhouse. She's seen the total number of visitors balloon into the hundreds of thousands over the years — organizers reported more than 160,000 participants last year. Guinn's memories of the fair also span decades. One of his earliest stories entails distracting a neighborhood dog with friends so they could jump on its doghouse and vault over the fair fence. "We didn't pay anybody," he laughed. "We were very ingenious." You can't put a price on the value of showing history, Guinn added. He cites a lesson he learned from another fair worker as a guiding perspective of the fair. "'[It's all about] being able to display things you have made and have confidence in the people you're working with,'" Guinn said. "It changed my attitude when she told me that. That's what it's about. It's about people."