Virginia, Part 2

Moving on out of Winchester, we headed south to Max Meadows and Whytheville. Whytheville, in addition to a quilt shop that offered hundreds of batik and related fabrics, also had an enormous pencil over the door to Wytheville Office Supplies. The pencil, according to the Big Stuff Website, is 30 feet tall and made of steel. It was created in the late 1950s. We were actually there to visit an old-time hardware store, the Kincer Miller Hardware Company. It was a medium-sized store that sold a little of everything, including holiday items and all sizes of nails, bolts, and other hardware.



The next day we set out for the Wolf Creek Indian Village, which was based on the findings of a nearby archeological dig. The village dates to a period from around 1490 to 1530 A.D., but there is no conclusive proof of what tribe lived there. The guides in the village demonstrate traditional crafts based on those done by local Cherokee and other woodlands peoples. Displays in the museum highlight information about the various native people in all the regions of North America.

The village is surrounded by a palisade of poles. The houses inside the barrier are round, but are divided between "wigwam" style homes and houses modeled after the picture I posted below while in Oklahoma at the Cherokee Heritage Center. (Amusing fact: I Googled for information on Cherokee Indian homes to find what the second type of structure was called, and got a link to my own blog post from Oklahoma!)

Since I posted quite a bit on the Heritage Center in Oklahoma, I've only uploaded two pictures for this post. The picture above right is a shot of the village; the picture to the left is the inside of the pottery hut. I had the opportunity to make cording from raffia. The guide suggested that I probably hadn't done that before, since apparently a lot of people don't do crafts much any more. I didn't have the heart to tell him I did it frequently to make braid-style cord for embroidery and other needlework; I just use floss instead of raffia.

After a walk down to Wolf Creek and a look around the gardens, we did some shopping in the museum gift shop, and moved on.