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Keeping the Old Ways Alive

The Hickory Ridge History Museum gives visitors a glimpse into the daily lives of early mountain settlers.

By Compelling Story

August 25^th, 2022

Imagine 1750s in frozen Appalachia. Go ahead and imagine. You, plopped down in the dead of winter in these hills with your North Face parka and your iPhone. It’s cold. Very cold. And you’re hungry because you were plopped down in a windy gap, the time portal pulling you in just before your avocado toast was served.

Your iPhone has no service to order on Doordash because you’re in 1750s Appalachia and if there is anyone else around you they likely have pegged you as an ill-prepared alien—if aliens were even thought of back then.

The Tatum cabin is estimated to date from 1785 and was located near Elk Crossroads in what is now Todd, NC.

Imagine. That’s what The Beatles wanted you to do. And it’s also a top priority of the Hickory Ridge Living History Museum in Boone. They want you to imagine the timeline of the settling of this region. This year the Museum celebrates 70 years.

This is why open-hearth reenactments at the Museum are so important to Mary Bohlen. The way people ate back then was, of course, central to how they lived and built their culture.

Mary Bohlen leads open hearth cooking demonstrations for visitors to the Hickory Ridge Living History Museum.

In the Museum’s Tatum House, a 230-year-old log cabin that’s just a short musket shot from The Horn in the West outdoor theater, Mary places the dough of cornmeal into the cast iron, closes it, throws coals on top, and tends to the finishing touches of a deliciously smelling meal—the wafts of which would have called in the rest of the family long before a booming voice from a doorway shouting “Dinner!”

“Those stories were passed down to me,” Mary said, “I remember I was about 11 years old when I fell in love with history and I never got tired of it.”

Mary tends to the finishing touches of a deliciously smelling meal.

Keeping the Old Ways Alive

Maybe you could call Mary Bohlen a pragmatic idealist—one who imagines the settlers of western North Carolina mountains would have loved something like a microwave. And while she might own a microwave and might have used it a time or two, she also goes to great lengths to spend certain weeks of every year cooking in an open hearth in a 230 year old log cabin while wearing period clothes that represent the people who suffered the severe Appalachian winters in the days of Daniel Boone.

It’s of great importance to her to pass down what she knows of the history of these hills and the ways in which our ancestors a few generations back would have faced the brutalities of life while still celebrating with abundant feasts whenever possible.

This is why for more than a decade now, Bohlen has led open hearth cooking demonstrations for visitors to the Hickory Ridge Living History Museum.

“I grew up on the stories of how my great great grandparents used to live,” Mary said. “Those stories were passed down to me because they were kept alive by families who’d sit around the wood stove telling the stories that connected them to where they came from. I remember I was about 11 years old when I fell in love with history and I never got tired of it.”

But she was convinced that history was not an abstraction that merely chronicled political periods and great feats of famous people, but rather a story that was lived and that brought us to where we are.

For people to know history, it’s best that it engages their five senses, including the olfactories and the taste buds.

Drawn to the Appalachians by childhood camping trips, Mary also fell in love with the lifestyle and history of the hills where settlers braved weather and danger and had to plan months in advance to feed their families.

“As I’m ordering supplies for our demonstrations I try to put myself into the shoes of those families,” she says. “What kinds of food would have been available to them. You couldn’t just run to the store for sugar or spices, both of which were exotic and very expensive.”

The Tavern was originally an outbuilding and was moved to the Hickory Ridge Museum grounds in 1969.

In the fall and winter, especially in harshest months, anything prepared would have come from what had been stored before the snow moved in. Collard greens, turnip greens, apples stored in a cellar, venison and bear as the main meet dish, and, hopefully, some kinds of bread—especially goods made from cornmeal.

“I grew up on the stories of how my great great grandparents used to live,” Mary said.

“The history of cooking and of food in this region allows me to teach about the region’s history, and it helps to connect people to that history in a more immediate way,” Mary says. “I’m amazed at how people are drawn to that. It opens up the door to a lot of things, including a lot of discussions to engage their thinking and imagination and to realize how far we’ve come.”

“I love to ask children ‘Would you like to live here? No running water. No indoor toilets or baths.’ Of course some of them say they’d love it, but most are left speechless. It’s a way to make history and culture alive and visible and real. It’s better than reading it in a history book.”