Hanging out at the museum
Historic museum is big draw for Cherokee County
Frank Bradley Sentinel writer

Wanda Stalcup, who has been with the museum for the past 11 years, greeted almost 50 visitors at the Cherokee County Museum.

They came from California, Illinois, Missouri, Ohio Massachusetts, Maryland and maybe a few other states. They spent Sunday night at the Ramada Inn in Hiawassee, Georgia, but Murphy, North Carolina was their first destination on a week-long Elder-hostel tour.

And the Cherokee County Museum was their first stop in town. Museum director Wanda Stalcup was there to greet almost 50 folks who climbed the stairs to the second and main floor of the museum. Within minutes, she had the crowd in the palm of her hand as they listened intensively to this strange mountain talk that once existed in a long-ago time and an isolated land.

"My grandfather raised me, plus 13 of his own kids," Stalcup said. "He was an old fashioned Baptist and always had a Bible verse for any occasion."

ThenStalcup coaxed Lee Knight, the group's tour guide to come up front and they sang a song she had learned from her grandfather cautioning girls not to "bob" their hair. Short hair was for men, long hair for women.

Robert and Anna Mohynahan used to come to western North Carolina two or three times a year.

Stalcup, who has been with the museum for the past 11 years, told the group that the museum has been in existence for 31 years.

"We have artifacts of early pioneer settlers and Cherokee Indians, rocks, minerals, Civil War items, the first pair of blue jeans made by Lee Company, more than 1,000 dolls, fairy crosses among our collection," Stalcup said.

She pointed out a weathered liquor still with holes in it, put there by revenuers. She told them of creek-runners, who were paid informants to scout out the area and locate where folks had their stills hidden. Theywould tell the sheriff or federal agents, who would come through later and ax the still or shoot holes in it.

"That would put the moonshiners out of business for a few days," Stalcup said.

She told of one church group raising money to expand their church building, who put out a cookbook with a recipe for making moonshine.

"Theyhad a note in the front of the cookbook," she said, "A note that read that while it is illegal to sell moonshine, it is not illegal to tell how to make it."

Mayor Bill Hughes stopped by the museum to welcome the visitors asking them to spend time looking around and inviting them to write him if they came up with any ideas of improving or making the town better. He also told the visitors of the early settlers.

"The white settlers who first came to the area were mostly English, German and Scots- Irish," he said. "The first thing the English settlers built was a cabin to live in, the Germans built their barn first, and the Scots-Irish settlers, the first thing they constructed was a liquor still. From that you could tell what their priories were."

Stalcup explained that when she grew up, living in these mountains hadn't changed much from the early settler days.

"Like them, my grandfather did a little farming. He grew Burley tobacco. We always had a cow. After milking, we'd bring the milk home, strain it and put it in the refrigerator (of course in earlier times that milk went to the Spring House). "

Stalcup told how the cream was separated from the milk, churned in a jar, gathered into butter blobs, which was placed in cold water and the milk was squeezed out of the butter. Then after a little salt and sometimes honey was mixed with the butter, it was put in a butter mold."

Stalcup told the visitors that when she grew up, they had gravity water. "We called it running water," she said.

She told the guests about making lye soap out of hog fat. Told them how the expressions, "Don't throw the baby out with the wash" and "Spitting image," came about.

Mountaineers took baths she said in a big tub with the men taking their baths first, then the boys, then the women folks, girls and finally the baby was last. By the time the baby was put in the bath tub, the water was pretty dirty."

The term "spitting image" was really a mispronunciation of "splitting image" when a wood cutter had split a log right down the middle where both halves looked alike.

Stalcup showed the guests how old-timers made braided rugs; she talked about how quilts were made to keep warm and how finely some of them were quilted with elaborate patterns. She pointed out baskets woven by Indians and early settlers from river-cane and some made from bark.

She talked about husking and shelling corn when she was a young girl. How the corn was taken to mill to be ground into corn meal. "We said we were taking the corn to turn," she said, referring to it getting ground.

Most of the visitors were older than Stalcup; some much older. Nevertheless, they all seemed fascinated by her talk about Appalachian culture.

I talked to Katie Fickenschur, who said she now lives in Los Angeles, but had grown up in Sacramento, California.

"Our little house sat on the ground," Fickenschur told me. "When I got married, I was given a washboard and a wicker basket for a wedding gift."

Fickenschur's sister, Anna, along with Anna's husband, Robert Mohynahan, who live in Cincinnati, Ohio, were also in the group. They said they are both master gardeners, and had been involved in growing and showing Dahlias since the 1990's.

"We've always been interested in the Cherokee Indians," Robert said. "We used to come to western North Carolina two or three times a year until we began growing the Dahlias."

Robert said they grow the smaller variety and had hybridized several new flowers, one named after them called the "Robann Dahlia."

As the morning wound down, the visitors left the museum and made their way downtown admiring the historic courthouse and perhaps finding a place to set a spell and have lunch.