Appalachian History at Foxfire Museum

Address: 200 Foxfire Ln., Mountain City

Contact: 706-746-5828; foxfire.org

Admission: $6 for everyone age 11 and older, $3 for ages 7 to 10; free for ages 6 and younger; reservations required for guided tours

Hours: Monday-Saturday, 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m

It’s the kind of story that makes a homeschooler’s heart sing: Back in the 1960s, an idealistic young English teacher wanted to get his students excited about learning so he took the novel approach of asking them what they wanted to do. Their answer: Creating a magazine to preserve the history of the Appalachian South where they’d grown up. That high school project ultimately morphed into the Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center in the North Georgia mountains, where more than twenty different log cabin structures (including a blacksmith shop, church, and grist mill) recreate what life was like for Georgia’s mountain villages around the turn-of-the-century. For the last thirty-eight years, the Foxfire students (and their teachers) have worked to create this one-hundred-and-ten-acre trip back in time. Mountain life in the nineteenth and twentieth century meant hard work in the fields and in the kitchen, but the Foxfire Museum captures the joy and beauty of that life, too. 

5 Things You Shouldn’t Miss at the Foxfire Museum

1. The Zuraw Wagon was used on the Trail of Tears.

2. Test your balance on stilts, a traditional Appalachian amusement.

3. Work by the Village Weaver (artist-in-residence Sharon Grist) is on display at the Tiger House.

4. More than one hundred and fifty different plants and flowers grow along the Nature Path.

5. Homemade toys in the Moore House show how mountain children entertained themselves.

Insider Tip

Schedule a tour rather than just strolling the grounds alone. On a tour, you’ll get to go inside many of the cabins, but you can only peek through the windows on the self-guided tour.

Required Reading

The Foxfire Book, a collection of articles, recipes, and living history, is collected from the magazine that started it all.

Fun Fact

The sled on the front porch of one of the cabins was for working steep fields (where a wagon might not be able to safely go), not for snowy days.

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