Buh-Bye 2013, Hellooo 2014! :D / Cherokee County, NC Historical Museum

Well, 5,000 loads of laundry later, I believe we are officially lice-free.  Whoopee!!!

I'm glad to see 2013 go.  2013 seemed to be The Year That Constantly Blew Explosive Diarrhea All Over Deana's Face.  :P  I really feel like 2014 will be a lot better.

It's been a little rough this Christmas Break, with Lilly being out of school, Jamie being on temporary unemployment from his job, and me being at home.  It's tough for all 3 of us to be all cooped up in the house together for a couple of weeks straight, in each other's faces all the time, it being too cold and wet to go outside for very long, and Lilly bored and fussy half the time.

On Tuesday this week, Jamie took Lilly to the Historic Courthouse Museum in town (we've been to it several times), but Lilly was bored and wanted to go again, so away they went.  It gave them something to do for an afternoon, and it gave me a much-needed peaceful time at home all by myself for a while.

On Wednesday this week, Jamie took Lilly to see the scale model railroad in our town (even though they've been to it several times before), but the old man that runs it had taken a fall and broken a couple of his ribs recently, so they are closed for the season.

It's gonna be hard to keep Lilly entertained until she goes back to school on the 7th.  Sheesh.  That's a little bit too-long of a Christmas Break if you ask me.

Lilly kept us up all night long a couple of nights in a row this week.  She just couldn't get sleepy, couldn't go to sleep, and constantly kept me and Jamie up, asking us "how many more hours 'til morning"?  It was really aggravating.  Each night, I eventually somehow finally got to sleep (after kicking Lilly out of my bedroom), and when I finally did wake up in the morning, I discovered that it was actually noon or 1:00 PM.  Ugh.  Freakin' Lilly.  That kid's gonna be the death of me.  (Or at least the cause of my prematurely graying hair).  :/

Anyway, when I finally managed to drag myself out of the bed early yesterday afternoon, I was sitting on the loveseat in the living room drinking my coffee and having my customary pop-tart, when Lilly began getting bored, acting up, and begging to go somewhere and do something.  She was begging to go to Fun World, but I put my foot down, because the last time Jamie took Lilly there, they ended up spending $40, and that's just too damn much for basically nothing.

So I said "What's something to do around here that's fun, and free (or cheap)?"  Jamie wondered if there were any other museums around close by, and I said I'm sure there would have to be.  So he told me to check to see what museums there are in Blue Ridge, and Murphy, North Carolina.  I was already surfing the internet while drinking my coffee, so I Googled around and found a cool-looking museum in Murphy, NC for us to go to.  We don't live too terribly far from Murphy, NC, and before we got a Wal-Mart here in our town, the closest Wal-Mart we used to have to go to was in Murphy, NC.  So the drive isn't all that bad from our house.

Anyway, we all finally got ready, and off we went.  Jamie drove us in his truck, since his heater heats up so much faster in it than my car's does.

Lilly brought along the Hello Kitty wristwatch that she got for Christmas, and she asked me to set it for her.  So I looked down at it for several minutes, fiddling around to set it, and ended up getting carsick.  I wasn't too bad nauseated (not enough to actually puke), but the first thing I did after I finished getting Lilly's watch set was to roll down the window to get some cold, fresh air, and re-fasten my bra to the loosest notch, since the carsickness somehow caused me to feel like the stupid bra was cutting me in half.

We finally got to the museum, and ended up having to park off of a side-street nearby.  At first, I felt like I was too carsick to go in, and thought I should just probably stay in the truck the whole time, while Jamie and Lilly went ahead and enjoyed the museum by themselves.  I told Jamie that I didn't really want to go in to the museum carsick and end up puking all over the place.  Then Jamie asked if he wanted us to "just give it a few minutes", and I asked "Can we?"  I didn't really want to miss seeing the cool museum.  I really like that kind of stuff, and we'd never been there before.  So I took off my jacket and hopped out of the truck to stand out in the cold, fresh air for a few moments.  It made me feel a little better, so I said "OK let's go", and we all made the short walk over to the museum.  I did feel just a little woozy off and on during our museum visit, but it wasn't bad at all.  So that was good.

Here are the pictures that I took.

This is the outside of the front of the museum:

One of the first things I noticed inside the museum was this doll from 1865!:

I'm guessing that the doll must have been restored and is probably wearing a newer dress, but it's still awesome to see what a doll from almost 150 years ago looked like.

Here's a picture of the little girl who owned the doll and is holding it, along with her brother:

Obviously for kids from this era to 1) even have their picture made in the first place, and 2) for the little girl to have her picture made with like 9 or 10 of her dolls, and 3) for the boy to be posed reading a book, I would gather that they must have come from a pretty rich family.  I bet many little girls in other, less well-to-do families would probably be lucky to have some ol' handmade rag doll to play with, or one made out of corn shucks (with the cob being reserved for toilet paper, LOL), and a little boy might have a small wagon home-made out of wood scraps from around the farm.  And now kids beg for expensive-ass iPhones/iPads/iPods & whatever other 'iStuff' they make, and don't even truly appreciate what they have.

Here are pictures of a few more old dolls and toys that they had on display:

My Grandmaw had a little toy cast-iron stove similar to the one in the back of the picture below, and I absolutely loved playing with it.  I wish I had been able to take it home with me when we cleaned her house out after she passed on, but someone else unfortunately snatched it up before I could.  :(

I actually had a toy eggbeater with the red handles exactly like the one in the picture below when I was a little girl.  It really worked and I liked playing with it:

Along with my little toy eggbeater like the one pictured above, I had a little set of toy pots and pans and dishes (all metal; none of that plastic Made-In-China crap that they pump out today), and I had a little play kitchen which consisted of a fridge and stove that my Aunt Brenda got for me one Christmas that I absolutely adored.  It was all made of metal too.  And of course, it was harvest gold-colored, which was all the rage at that time.  I loved that thing so much that I finally relented and reluctantly allowed Dad to chunk it out when he was cleaning out his basement just a few years ago...and I'm about to turn 37.  :/  It was all rusty and mice had made good use of it over the years, so I had to finally tell it bye-bye.  :(  I remember that the oven part of it used to scare the crap out of me because it had a big long metal spring attaching the oven door to the actual oven part (like that used to be on old screen doors) that would make the most God-awful spine-tingling screechy racket whenever you opened and closed the toy oven door.  *shudder*  LOL!  Come to think of it, I was scared to death of the sound that the "coyote" made on my See 'N' Say, too:

Curse ye, Coyote!  You used to scare the piss out of me!  LOL!

I was a weird kid.  And I guess I'm still weird.  Oh, well!

Next, I saw this totally awesome old TV:

Check it out.  A wood cabinet, knobs (no remote control -- you have to actually get your ass up off the couch to go change the channel and adjust the volume and stuff)!  And you know it was Black & White -- not even color.  With a tiny-ass, weird rounded screen.  Not to mention the fact that what few channels you could probably even pick up were probably staticky.  And by golly, if you were even lucky (and rich) enough to have one of these things, you were proud of it!  No fancy, color HDTV with digital cable or surround sound back then, nosirree!

That cool old TV was sitting on top of this old telephone switchboard:

Can you believe that a phone operator (usually a lady) used to have to actually sit at one of these things and plug the wire in to the hole of whoever you wanted to talk to?  Cell phones?  Hah!  This switchboard reminded me of when I used to work for the bank, and one of my many duties was having to answer the stupid phones for our department.  It made me feel like I was working with one of these dumb old things.  The stupid bank that I worked for is so unreasonably old-fashioned in their ways that it's not been until kind of recently that they would even allow their employees to have voice mail.  They thought it was too "impersonal", and that everyone had to be greeted on the phone by a live person.  Which is understandable for customers, but for internal calls between employees?  PUH-LEEZE.  You know I'd like to be able to get up and go to the bathroom whenever I need to instead of having to announce it to the world and feel like I'm having to beg and inconvenience someone to watch the phones for me while I'm away from my desk for a few minutes ever so often.  It was humiliating.  That's one of the many, many reasons that I quit.  It was so stupid.  By the way, speaking of the bank that I used to work for, they ended up blocking their employees' internet access to this blog.  Hah!

But anyway, speaking of phones, check out this cool old phone booth from the 1920s:

The inside walls were pressed tin.  How cool is that?  The phone booth was so tall, and the area it was located in was kind of cramped up with display cases full of antique dolls, so I couldn't get a great picture of it.

Here's the plaque that was above the phone booth that tells a little more information about it:

And here's the picture that I asked Lilly to take of me standing in front of the phone booth:

And keeping with the subject of phones, here is a collection of some old ones that were in a nearby display case:

At first, I didn't know what the Elvis stuff was doing in there, but then I realized that the Elvis item on the left is actually a phone.  I can only hope that when it rings, that Elvis gyrates his pelvis and goes "a-uh-huh" until you answer it.

And here's the rest of the phones and other stuff:

Then this wad of money that was displayed in a nearby display case full of military items caught my eye, so I snapped a picture of it:

How'd you like to discover that in an old coat pocket?

And here are pictures of the rest of the military stuff that the wad of money above was included with:

Lilly was freaked out by the female mannequin on the top shelf.

And I thought this old hat was cool because you never really see these around anywhere:

This old pair of Civil War-era boots were located nearby:

Upon review of my photos, I have come to the conclusion that it's actually pretty funny to see what I think is awesome and/or interesting enough to take a picture of.

Take this electrical outlet from 1926, for instance.  It came out of the Cherokee County, NC Courthouse, and for some reason, I thought it was freakin' awesome:

I guess it's because back then, only fancy/rich people or important public buildings actually had electricity.  So while the courthouse was enjoying having an electric lamp (or the very first cast-iron George Foreman grill) or something, everybody else at home was probably still using dirty ol' stinky nasty kerosene lamps, or rolled-up cow terds set in a saucer and lit on fire or something.  (LOL, just kidding about the cow terds).

Then you've got this totally awesome old light bulb:

I wonder how bright that thing was?  And look at that little tit-tip at the top.  Now those things were built to last.  It's a shame they don't make 'em like that today.  Did you know that one of the first light bulbs that Thomas Edison made has been burning continuously ever since it was first fired up way back when?  It's true!  It's never failed once.  Now where can I get me one of those suckers to bolt onto the floodlights on the end of my house that you've gotta get a great big ol' tall ladder to reach?

Here's a cabinet (again, wood!) that would be in an eye doctor's office many years ago.  Can you imagine being at the eye doctor, and him asking you -- "Now which one's better...'One',......(*and he shuffles off for several minutes to retrieve another lens from the wooden cabinet, and then finally shuffles back with it*)......Or 'Two'?"  *huff puff huff puff*...LOL!

When I saw this thing in the museum, I only skimmed maybe the first few paragraphs before I was like, HOLY CRAP and just took a picture and kept on walking:

I croaked when I read the parts about "Always have clean hands", "Blow away white dust occasionally", the part where it suggests using CANDY WRAPPERS for fillings, and the other part where it says to use white soap or candle wax to make white-colored fillings.

It wasn't 'til I got home, loaded these pictures onto my laptop, and began looking at them more closely that I finally realized that this was a child's toy dentist kit -- not a real dentist kit, as I had previously thought while I was actually standing there looking at it in the museum!  LOL!  XD

Located near the toy dental tools that I showed you above were a wide variety of other *actual* medical tools.  One being THIS FORCEPS:

Yep, that's right.  That kind of forceps.  Used to "tong" stuck babies out of their poor mothers' hoo-hoos.  You can't really tell the scale size of it from this picture, but trust me, this thing was HUGE.  I guess I felt compelled to take a photo of it because -- yikes -- I know they had to use one of these contraptions to aid in the extraction of me from my mommy.  And she didn't have any kind of pain medication throughout the entire delivery.  Ouch.

Here are a couple of pictures of some more interesting medical equipment (thank God they don't do this crap anymore!  For one, it's totally useless, and for two, it would hurt like hell!):

I must say that the dark stains on the paper label below add an unintended element of creepiness to the medical implement which it describes:

Did you know that doctors used to bleed people as a way to try to cure them of their diseases?  Today, it's believed that being 'bled' too much was the actual cause of George Washington's death.

Here's some dental equipment:

Hmm...the dental stuff doesn't seem to have changed all that much.  I think most dental equipment still looks like this today.  No wonder they hide these tools and keep them out of your sight while they're working on you.  This crap's scary-looking!

And now for something completely different...(whew):

So, I'm not sure if this shoe was mangled because of the lightning, or if it's just so old-ass that it's deteriorated, but I prefer to think that the lightning struck this shoe directly, which blew it off of the teacher full-force, and it flew straight out of the window all the way down to the play-yard.  Even though I'm sure that didn't happen at all.  But I can pretend.

The "lightning shoe" was located in this corner of the museum, dedicated mostly to old-timey school stuff:

I was fascinated to learn that this was what they used to use for a "blackboard":

Get it?  It's a bunch of BOARDS, stacked up together on their sides and painted BLACK.  Seriously.  That's what they used to use, and that's how they got the term 'blackboard'.  It makes so much more sense now!  Who knew?  Certainly not me!  Thanks, museum!  I learned something new!  :D

And here's a neat old cross-stitched sampler that was on the wall in that "schoolhouse" corner of the museum:

I couldn't get a great picture of it because 1) my stupid little camera sucks, 2) I had to zoom it in all the way, 3) I was basically having to straddle this cast-iron stove to even get the shot in the first place:

...and 4) I was still a little shaky from being carsick.

I was under the impression that the cross-stitch work was from 1776 (because that's the first date on it), but I wasn't paying close enough attention at the time that I was actually standing there looking at it in the museum, so now that I see this picture on my laptop, I notice the ending "1976" date, so obviously that's when this cross-stitch was probably made.  And something that was made in 1976 is NOT AN ANTIQUE.  I know first-hand, because I was made in 1976, and I am NOT OLD.  Which reminds me...I need to put hair dye that has 'good gray coverage' on the shopping list...LOL!

Here's a Room Rack Ledger from the Regal Hotel (and a photo of the old 'ding-ding' service desk bell attached to it):

I don't really know exactly what they would even use this for.  Keys?  Mail?  The bill for the room and/or room service?  Anyway, it's cool, and I bet if they knew back then that one day all we would need to get into a hotel room is a weird little plastic card, they would look at us like we had an ass growing right on the front of our foreheads.

Here's an awesome old grandfather clock.  It's English, and was made sometime in the 1700s:

I was distracted by Jamie and Lilly trottin' around me when I was trying to take a picture of it, so I forgot to try to get a full-length picture.  But when I was looking at this picture on my laptop (and zoomed in on the label on the clock to see where the clock was made and when --since I couldn't remember for sure--), I saw that the face of the clock had a saying embossed on it that I didn't even notice was there when I was looking at it in person at the museum:

I believe it says "What of the piece with your weft".  BUT WHAT IN THE HECK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?!?  I know that 'weft' is a term in weaving.  And this phrase is printed on a clock, which must be symbolic.  So I guess it's the 18th-century way of saying "Time's a-tickin'...so whaddaya gonna do with your life"?  Or, to paraphrase it even further (since the clock is English, after all), "Get your arse off of the divan and DO something, ya bloody lazy pillock"!

And here's another cool clock that's just pretty and doesn't have a phrase on it that causes you to sit in the corner and think about your life:

(Did they mention NOT to touch anything in the museum or lean on anything?  Oh, they did?  There are signs stating that fact every 6 inches?  Oh, thanks for letting me know; I never noticed that).  LOL!

On a slightly more somber note, here is a display of photos of some former slaves that lived in Murphy, NC:

Here are some close-ups.  These men and lady were born into slavery (it's just so hard to imagine what kind of life that would have been, but I guess if you didn't know any differently, then like anything else, it might just seem normal to you):

But the picture from the slavery display that was most fascinating to me of all was this one:

Read the label.

Y'all were way ahead of your time, folks.  Way ahead of your time.

The museum also had tons of samples of all kinds of different rocks, minerals, and gems.  But this one in particular really caught my eye.  It looked a lot more interesting in person; the picture doesn't do it justice.  Lilly said the designs look like something you'd draw with a Spirograph.  It totally does!  And to me, the fact that it's over 200 million years old just blows my mind.  It's so cool.

They had a bunch of old clothing and accessories, too:

Look at those boots.  Look at that collar!  And look at that purse.  Can you imagine wearing that stuff?  Can you imagine that these are the things that you would wear (and everybody around you was wearing) way back when?  Today it looks like stuff from some movie, play, pretend dress-up costume, or for Halloween.  But this was stuff that ladies actually wore EVERY DAY.  Can you imagine there not being any comfy t-shirts, yoga pants & flip-flops to drag on after a hard day?  WHEW.  No thanks!

Check out the ladies' hat that looks like a worn-out hemmorhhoid donut embellished with white chicken tail-feathers!:

I wonder how many times all that stuff was sported to town or church?

And dig this fragile umbrella:

The label says "umbrella", but I think I would call it a parasol.  Fancy!

I thought this neat old baby stuff was sweet:

Especially the teeny-tiny little baby shoes:

Complete with button-hook even for the toddlers.  It kind of makes you wonder...were kids back then better behaved than the rotten kids we have today?  Can you imagine trying to button-hook up a child's boots today with them pitching a fit, kicking and screaming?  The parent attempting to dress the bratty kid would end up with their eyeball disengorged and dangling off the end of that little hook from being kicked in the face with it by the rotten kid!  I guess that's why they endorsed spanking the crap out of kids back then.  Because if you misbehaved and pitched a tantrum, you'd end up getting maimed or killed on all the dangerous-ass equipment and stuff that they had laying around all over the place!  O__o

Along the same lines with clothing, what surprised the heck out of me were these irons:

Huh?  An iron heated by kerosene?  Look at its little bitty gas tank!  How funny!

And what are these?  Irons that were heated by charcoal?  What is this, laundry day, or a cookout?

And now what?  Irons heated by white gas?  What do you do with those?  Drag them to the gas station and pump a penny's worth into their cute li'l tiny tanks?  (Actually to fill up those tiny tanks these days, it would probably cost you $20 each)!  LOL >:{

Seriously, though.  It looks like these wacky old irons that use fuel would just end up leaking or puffing out soot and getting your clean clothes all dirtied up again.  Sheesh.  What a pain in the A!

And now...a Confederate $100 bill:

And from back when each of the States printed their own money, here is a North Carolina dollar, and North Carolina 5-cents and 10-cents bills.  That's right, no metal coins for 'cents' at that time.  And notice that each of the individual bills are hand-numbered and signed.  What if they had to do that today?  Wow.

Can you imagine your wallet crammed full of this Monopoly-looking money, and only ending up having like, 75 cents total?  What a pain in the butt!  No wonder they started making coins!  Of course, 75 cents back then could probably buy you a big fancy house on a million acres of land, a super-nice car (if they had been invented yet), and one of those big ol' huge gaudy and ridiculous gold necklaces that rappers wear to prove how rich and successful they are.

(Case in point, here's a rare still color picture from the year 1865 taken from the music video of the famous rapper 35-Cent's rousing original rendition of 'I Make It Rain'):

♪...I MAKE IT RAIN, I MAKE IT RAIN, I MAKE IT RAIN, I MAKE IT RAIN...♪

♪...5-CENT, 5-CENT BILLS, Y'ALL, 5-CENT, 5-CENT BILLS...♪

LOL!

Here's a moldy old Sears Roebuck Catalog.  Gee, it seems awfully thin.  I mean, I don't know what they're supposed to look like, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the rest of that mag was probably used up, one page at a time, and ended up thrown down the outhouse hole, if you know what I mean!  ;D

Here's a display case of a variety of eyeglasses, razors, hatpins, hair combs and stuff:

I wonder how dudes kept from cutting the crap out of their faces when they used those straight-razors?  Practice, I guess.  I bet everybody was excited when they invented that kind of razor that held a single blade that you installed and removed yourself.  I guess those were considered the disposable razors of their time, even though you only disposed of the single razor blade after it got dull, and kept the part that you hold on to.  Also, I've never given this any thought until now, but I wonder if ladies shaved back then?  You never see or hear anything about it.  I wonder if they all had woolly pits and legs under all them layers of fluffy petticoats and hoop-skirts?  Probably.  That's probably why they wore them...to hide their leg fur.

Here's some random dinner equipment:

I liked the "servant's bell" in particular.  Can you imagine ringing that thing to get the next course of your meal brought out to you, or ringing it to let "The Help" know that you're done, so they can come clean it up now?  (Like the telephone switchboard, this servant's bell also reminds me of when I used to work at the bank and had to constantly arrange fancy catered luncheons for the "big-wigs" -- and clean up after it when they got done).  I hated doing that crap.  And worst of all is that 9 times out of 10, I'd have to pay for it all with my own money and have to wait a week or two to get reimbursed by the accounting department for it!  Grr!  Man, I hated that job!  Don't get me wrong, I don't mind in the least to do "crappy" tasks, but above all, I never signed up for that job.  I was forced into it.  Which automatically made me hate it.  But anyway...

One of the back corners of the museum was stuffed full of a random variety of all kinds of stuff, so I stood back and took a picture of all of it together:

(Closeup of the cool old trunk that is in the picture above):

A record player, you say?  DING-DONG, YOU'RE WRONG.  Well, it's kind of a record player, but instead of playing those flat, disc-shaped records, it plays those (even older) black cylinders that look like toilet paper rolls:

Take THAT, MP3s!

(And if you look very closely, you can see that the music roll that is currently in place on this antique music device is none other than a recording from the year 1865 of the famous rapper '35-Cent' singing his rousing original rendition of 'I Make It Rain')!

LOL!

More ladies' old scary black clothes and accessories:

Super-ancient baby cradle:

Well, I guess it's one step better than laying the kid down in the dirt...

And in the middle of the mix is a super-old piano  ~NOPE~  melodeon:

I've never even heard of a melodeon.  I wonder what it sounds like?  Probably like a mix between being at church and the circus, if I had to guess.

And below are some more pictures of the random mix of cool old stuff all jumbled together.

A sink with plumbing?  Who needs something fancy like that when you've got this pitcher and bowl on this awesome wooden stand complete with built-in towel racks?  (Hey, at least you could move this thing around the room if you wanted to, unlike a sink with plumbing)!

(There's a quilt for sale for $100 at the bottom, left side of the picture below...remember it...I'll mention it again later).

This sewing stuff made me think of Me-Maw:

I used to love playing with Me-Maw's old sewing machine.  I liked to get under it and pump the cast-iron pedal with my hands whenever I was little and stayed at her house.

I thought that this ceiling lamp was cool:

What if this was the overhead light in your house today?  I mean, no wonder crap ended up burning down to the ground all the time way back in the day, having to use sketchy contraptions like this in order to light up your house.  "What do you use to light your house, Jim?"  Jim says, "Basically, OPEN FLAMESSSSS" (as he dabs the soot from his face, eyes, and hands with a tatted lace handkerchief and coughs dryly).

Here's Jamie and Lilly posing next to a huge carved wooden Native American Cherokee Indian head.

I told Jamie to pose next to it, and Lilly insisted on posing too, which of course is fine, but that's as far as Lilly would actually 'pose'.  It was a mixture of her 1) being engrossed in the new book we just bought her from the gift shop, and 2) her just plain being a terd.

This neat little train engine model was nearby.  Lilly got bored (of course), and the lady working there was super-nice (and noticed that Lilly was getting bored with her dopey parents taking forever to gawk at all the old junk), so she showed Lilly how to press the buttons to 'toot' the whistles on this little train.

Thankfully they weren't *actual* train whistles, so they weren't loud.  They were just sample recordings so museum visitors could hear what train whistles sound like.  You know, in case you were born under a rock, have lived your entire life under that same rock, and the first time you ever crawled out from under that rock was to go to this museum and had never heard train whistles before.

I've practically remained under a rock my entire life, and even I know what train whistles sound like.  LOL!

Keeping with the train theme, I thought this was pretty cool:

It's a Coke cooler...for a train!

Here's a close-up of the paper that's laying on top of it, which has more information about it:

Sometimes it's hard to remember that Coke has been around that long.

And as a side note, if you're me, it's not really a "Coke" or a "Coca-Cola".  Since I'm Southern, I call ANY fizzy soft drink a "Co-Colie".  That's right, even Sprite, Dr. Pepper, Mountain Dew, Sunkist, root beer, ginger ale, a Pepsi; you name it.  Everything's a "Co-Colie" except for coffee, tea, milk, juice, and water.  That's just the way it is here for many people in the South.  I know I'm not alone.

This great ol' big metal barrel was nearby:

Here's a closeup of the top:

Hmm, I wonder what they kept in this barrel?  Obviously some kind of liquid.  Maybe kerosene or gas?  I don't know for sure.  Weird.

Here's a crusty old hand-carved fiddle.  I took pictures of this stuff for Dad, since he plays the fiddle:

I bet that ol' fiddle smells terrible.  :P  Bleh!  I bet you'd sneeze your ass off if you attempted to play it!  Shoo!  LOL!

And here's some rotten ol' handmade banjos.  They're so tiny compared to the ones they make today.  I wonder what the heck they sounded like when they were new?:

*Note that, much like how "Coca-Cola" is pronounced "Co-Colie", a "banjo" is actually a "banjer" in Deana/Southern-speak.*

Here's a full, overhead view of the display case full of fiddles & 'banjers':

And here's an autoharp and an accordion that was in the next case over:

(They had to isolate the accordion since it's such an awful-sounding instrument)...LOL!

Up high on the walls were all kinds of different quilts in display cases:

I saw one quilt in the museum that someone had made recently (it wasn't an antique) that was for sale...for $100.  It's in one of the pictures that I mentioned above.  I mean, I knew that handmade quilts were super-expensive (because Me-Maw always told me so), but I guess I just didn't realize it for real.  I have a whole bunch of handmade heirloom quilts made by my "grannies" on both sides of my family which I completely cherish (and never use, in order to preserve them).  But in a way, I guess I still kind of take my heirloom family quilts for granted a little bit, because I never thought about them being worth a ton of money.  Of course not that I would ever sell them even for a trillion dollars...they're completely priceless in sentimental value to me.  And the quilt for sale in the museum didn't even appear to be all that pretty, if you ask me.  I mean, sure, it was nice, but it couldn't hold a candle to anything that my Me-Maw or Grandmaw or Granny made.  And they thought their handiwork wasn't that great!  It was fantastic!  I'm so proud of the talent that all of my "grannies" had!  :)  <3

Next to the quilt case up on the wall were some more display cases of clothing and accessories:

In the picture above, the white dress was actually a wedding dress.

The colors of the first two dresses in the following picture were stunning in person.  And all of the black dresses were blacker than coal.  They were a little unnerving and creepy because I automatically assumed they were meant for funerals or mourning or something.  Ehh.

The next-to-last dress in the picture above was absolutely gorgeous in person.  The material was NOT printed that way; it was all WOVEN.  By hand.  'Cause that's about the only way they had to do designs like that back then.  Freakin' amazing.  Here's a slightly closer picture of it so you can see the detail a little better:

The museum had a 'downstairs' part to it, too.  This wooden cabinet in the picture below was at the top of the stairs.  Can you guess what this cabinet was used for?:

No, not something from a library or the courthouse...this cabinet was post-office boxes!  Made out of wood!  Wooden post-office boxes!  Can you imagine if post-office boxes were made out of wood today?  I never even realized that post-office boxes used to be made out of wood!  And some master craftsman had to hand-make them out of a TREE!  It just knocks my socks off to think about.

At the bottom of the stairs was this cool old pump-organ:

Man, I bet that thing was wheezy.  Check out those little green felt-covered circles to each side.  I wonder what those are for?  Places to sit flower vases, statuettes, framed pictures, or other decorative items?

If I was sittin' there playin' that thing, I'd set my 'Co-Colie' on one of them green circles!  Built-in Co-Colie coasters!  LOL!

They had a lot of Native American Cherokee Indian artifacts on the top floor of the museum, but almost the entire bottom floor of the museum was completely dedicated to the Cherokee.  They had so much awesome stuff.

My personal favorite was the Cherokee cabin.  It totally knocked my socks off:

The man at the museum explained to us that the reason that the Cherokee's cabins were only about 10 feet high was because that was as far up as a Cherokee man and his wife could easily raise the logs up over their heads when they were building their cabin together.  That makes sense.  I thought that was neat.

Here are pictures of the inside of the cabin.  Naturally, it was a little dark in there, so I used the flash on the camera to help light it up so you could see everything.  That's why most of the pictures look a little garish:

The dress isn't antique, but check out the buckskin pants draped over the chair in the foreground.  They are antique.  That's what a Cherokee man would have worn (and did wear).  And they would have been worn with suspenders, not a belt.

The bed in the picture below is an old rope bed.  Of course they didn't have box springs back then, so their bed frames had ropes stretched under them.  That's where we get the phrase "sleep tight", because it references tightening up the ropes to make sure the bed isn't too sagged-down in the middle and uncomfortable.

The mattresses for old rope beds back then would've been basically something like a duvet cover, except stuffed with straw or corn husks.  Each Spring, they would take the straw out, place it out in the sun to air it out for a while, and then stuff it right back in.  I think they would add more straw sometime in the Fall of the year during harvest time (when they had more "stuff" readily available to stuff into them) to fluff them up more if needed.

I thought it looked so cozy and inviting next to the fireplace, that I took a closer picture:

The outside wall of this replica cabin had an actual rock chimney for this fireplace, just like it would have had way back when.  The man at the museum explained to us that they used to build their chimneys with a "trick rock", which meant that they left one of the rocks near the bottom of the chimney loose.  That way, if the chimney caught on fire, they could simply remove that "trick rock", which would cause just the chimney itself to fall back away from the house, and that would save the house from burning down.  Then they'd just have to build another chimney; not a whole new house!  Awesome!

This cabin was one of my favorite things in the whole museum, so I made Jamie take my picture standing in front of it:

Here's Chief Skinny Dork posing next to a huge headdress:

We learned that there are 7 clans of the Cherokee:

My personal favorites are the Long Hair, and especially the Wild Potato.  LOL!

Here are some hand-carved wooden masks that represent each of the 7 Cherokee clans:

The third one is the Long Hair, and the fourth one is the Wild Potato.  I bet it was easy to carve.  LOL!  (Dang, I wish the stupid light hadn't have reflected on the glass so you could see the Wild Potato mask better)!  >:{  It kind of reminds me of a Pac-Man ghost!  LOL!

Here's a poster showing where each of the Native American tribes lived:

And nearby, they had a display of some woven bedspreads:

There was no driving to Wally World and grabbing a Bed-In-A-Bag off of the shelf back in those days!  Nope, if you wanted something nice to put on your (rope/straw-stuffed) bed, you had to weave it yourself!  On a loom! One string at a time!  And how they figured out how to do the patterns is beyond me!  It looks really complicated!

Here's an Account Ledger from a store.  No computers (or even calculators) back then!  I reckon if you had something to write with, some paper, and a bunch of stuff to sell (or trade), then that's basically all you needed to run a store.

After we checked out all the stuff in the downstairs section of the museum, we went back upstairs to give everything another look.

There were a whole bunch of all different kinds of tools.  What amazed and impressed me most was that people had to make all this stuff.  I mean, how?!?  How could anybody actually figure out how to make all this stuff?  And all they had to make the stuff out of was wood, metal, and rocks!  It's genius, if you ask me.  And how did they know that the carpenter's square that they handmade was actually truly square?  It blows my mind.

Hey, look up there!  It's Prince Albert In A Can!  LOL!

By this time, we had looked at everything in the museum really, really good, so we finally decided to head back home.

About the last thing I took a picture of inside the museum was this cool old bell:

I bet that son-of-a-gun was loud.

Here's a closeup of the label on the bell:

Hmm.  Let's do the math.  He had 2,000 acres and 9 kids.  So each kid got 222.2222222222222 acres each.  Gee, I hope they were able to split that up evenly, using equipment like this:

We finally exited the museum, but before we made our way back to the truck to go home, I took a few pictures of the stuff that they had sitting outside.

This old jail door, for one:

Here's the plaque for it, which tells more about it:

Laying on the ground nearby was this cornerstone of their old high school:

And here's the other side of the cornerstone:

Wait...what's that?  A Masonic symbol?  'Grand Master'?  Hmm.  Usually people put some kind of time capsule or other cool stuff in the cornerstones of buildings whenever they're under construction.  I wonder what was tucked away in this particular cornerstone?  The Holy Grail, maybe?  Of course, especially since the Masons were involved!  DUN DUN DUNNNNN!  LOL!

Next, Jamie alerted me to the fact that the gigantic rock in the yard of the museum wasn't just a gigantic rock, but a Cherokee carving!  Here's its plaque:

And here's the turtle.  It totally looked just like a turtle:

Then Jamie pointed out this big metal thing to me:

The museum and the police department are actually in the same building (but of course are completely separate), so cops were zipping in and out of there all day.  Right when Jamie was showing me this big ol' metal thing, a cop pulled up and parked in a parking space and got out to walk in to the police department.  Jamie was still gawking at this metal thing and telling me loudly how we could haul it to the scrap yard and sell it to them for a whole bunch of money since it weighs 500 pounds!  Of course he was totally joking, but the cop was standing right there and had to have heard what Jamie said (and I caught the vibe that the cop was mildly concerned about it), so I began nervously laughing it off and saying "ha ha, yep, that's a good one" while slapping my knee to prove to the cop that it was only a joke.  Way to go, Jamie...almost got us thrown in the pokey!  Whew!  LOL!

After we ditched the fuzz (LOL), Lilly actually wanted to pose with this painted bear for a picture, so I gladly took her up on her offer, since she doesn't usually like to have her picture made very often:

Then I spotted some other random monument further back in the museum's yard, so I hurried to snap a picture of it before we left:

It kind of creeped me out just a little.  It looks like it might have been a fountain at one time and/or like it belongs in a cemetery.  *shudder*

By this time, it was colder than a witch's tit, so we started making our way to the truck to head home.  The Cherokee County, NC Courthouse was right next door, and it looks really neat to me, so I took a picture of it.  It kind of reminds me of something out of a movie, like Back To The Future:

Very stern.  Very official.  Very intimidating.

We walked back to Jamie's truck and got in to head home.  A few minutes' drive down the road later, I began feeling a little carsick again.  There's something about Jamie's truck that just makes me feel yucky.  It has a faint odor which isn't really unpleasant; I mean it's just a normal smell of the interior of a vehicle, but for some reason it's kind of stifling to me.  That, combined with the fact that when I'm sitting in the front passenger's seat, my head just feels like it's got a slight pressure all around it, and it feels closed-up and smothery to me somehow.  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that it's a Dodge, and I've only driven Japanese-made Hondas for the past 17 years.  So my Japanese cars probably incorporate the proper Feng Shui into their design is my guess.  LOL!

Anyway, we hadn't been on the road back home long when Lilly began complaining that she was hungry.  Jamie was hungry too (no surprise there, both of them STAY dang hungry all the freakin' time).  So since Amazon paid Jamie for the sales of his Kindle eBooks the other day (a total of $9.78)!  We splurged and swung through the Krystal drive-thru and got us a sack o' 12!  LOL!

This truck was in front of us in the drive-thru:

It was an exterminator's truck!

We got our sack of Krystal burgers through the drive-thru window, and down the road we went.  I doled the burgers out between us all, so that we each got 4.  I still wasn't feeling too great, but I figured it was at least partly because I was probably secretly hungry and just didn't realize it.  So I began scarfing down my allotment of Krystal burgers.  I ate 3 of my 4, and was full.  After that, I didn't really feel that great anymore.  I didn't feel exactly sick to my stomach, but between the faint odor of Jamie's truck, its possibly crappy feng shui (?), us having the heater on (and it never seeming to be adjusted to be just right --it's always either too hot and stuffy or too cool--) and having too quickly stuffed myself full of stupid Krystal burgers, I ended up attempting to rip my bra off to get some relief.  Staying buckled up the whole time, and wearing a jacket, shirt, cami, and then the bra, I wrangled around and managed to get the bra unfastened.  It was a little better, but not good enough.  So I yanked the cups of the bra up and out of the front of my shirts, but that's as far as I could go with them.  So I ended up riding home with almost my entire bra hanging out the front of my shirt and I didn't care.  I looked like I was wearing two of those white particle masks around my neck:

LOL!

Note to self (when am I ever gonna learn?):  NEVER LOOK DOWN WHILE RIDING IN THE CAR.  NEVER.  NOT EVEN FOR A SECOND.  Either that, or always pack some Dramamine!  :P

But after all was said and done, we had a great day at the museum!  :D