Southside, TN
Visiting Yesteryear
The setting is so authentic—free of traffic lights, utility poles, or paved roads—it’s easy to imagine life in 19th-century Tennessee. The time-warp effect is by design, the brainchild of JoAnn Brown Weakley, a former fifth-grade teacher who believed a hands-on, living history museum would help students better understand the past. So, she opened one in the town of Southside (formerly Collinsville).
“A picture is worth a thousand words, and we provide a lot of pictures,” she says of the 14 original log structures and hundreds of period antiques on her family farm in Montgomery County, Tenn. Collected over the course of 45 years by Weakley and her husband, Glenn, the objects form the basis for the nonprofit museum that opened to the public five years ago.
Each year since, Kay Lange has brought her own fifth-grade classes to enjoy the Weakleys’ creation.
“The students absolutely love it,” says Lange, of Norman Smith Elementary School in nearby Clarksville. “The local angle is really important because when we talk about pioneers, they tend to think of Massachusetts and where they learned the founding people arrived. But to know that in the 1800s there were people here, and this is how they were living, it brings it all home to them.”
Lange also uses the trip to illustrate subjects other than history.
“Energy is a major focus of our science curriculum, and taking them back to a time when things were lit just by candles and showing them how the day would transpire, from sunup to sundown, makes a good correlation.”
Most visitors begin their excursion in the Weakley Visitor Center, an 1830s log house where JoAnn’s father-in-law was born and raised. A guide in period costume orients guests, and old-fashioned crafts and candies are available for purchase. From there, time-travelers can wander into a smokehouse, loom house, tobacco barn, wagon shed, corn crib, wash house, large home, church, and school. All the buildings except one were gathered from locations around the county—some purchased, others donated or “rescued”—and range in age from 130 to 170 years old. Most of the period furnishings were found throughout the country, though many have local connections.
An all-volunteer staff of about 20 operates the site spring through fall, plus during such holiday events as the Candlelight Tours in early December.
Dorothy Hodges, a retired mother and grandmother, greets guests in the schoolhouse. As students enter, she rings a bell and ushers them onto the wooden benches, urging them to open their primers for a lesson. Before the “school day” is over, visitors might participate in a spelling bee or experiment with hand-carved wooden toys at “recess.”
“They ask a lot of questions,” Hodges says. “I like to point out to them how important it is to study hard in school today … because if these people had not used their brains to think, ‘How can I make this process better?’ then we would still be living like this. It gets their minds churning and thinking.”
Betty Leimer, another guide, prefers working in the kitchen.
“I explain to them how large families had a vegetable garden and had to hunt wild game for meat,” says Leimer, whose husband, Fred, and brother-in-law, Stanley, help restore the buildings. “It’s hard for children to understand, since they can go into Kroger and buy their canned goods or whatever they want, that they didn’t have Kroger back then.”
Weakley is pleased her dream has been so fully realized, but when pressed she admits even grander visions.
“Perhaps a larger visitor center with an audiovisual presentation. I’d also like to have the funding to get the word out to more people and to pay folks so we could be open seven days a week, 364 days a year.
“But,” she says, “I think it’s pretty wonderful like it is.”
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